Study: Hospitals Not Doing Enough To Screen For HIV

Two years after the Centers For Disease Control urged doctors and hospitals to routinely test their patients for HIV, the mandate has fallen on deaf ears.

Only about 5 percent of patients with evidence of serious illness are being routinely tested in hospital emergeny rooms for the HIV virus, according to Veronica Miller, director of the Forum for Collaberative HIV research at George Washington University.

According to a study released this week at a conference in Arlington Virginia, the primary reasons for ignoring the recommendations are that the test takes too much time and that insurers may be reluctanct to pay for the test.

"Reimbursement is a major barrier to routine testing" said Kevin Fenton, Director of HIV prevention at the CDC.

In urban emergency rooms, infection rates run from 0.5 to 1 percent of people tested, although many choose not to be tested, studies presented at the conference found.

At John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County, in Chicago, about 2,000 patients who went to the emergency room and were ill enough to be admitted were offered HIV tests. Just under 1 percent were infected, and more than 90 percent of them had CD4 cell counts below 200. At that level, a person has severe immune system damage and is considered to have AIDS.

Recent studies have also concluded that irreparable damage is done to the human body when retroviral treatment is started too late, when CD4 counts dip below 200.

While the odds of being HIV positive have proven to be quite small among those tested in hospitals, those that have tested positive are clearly too far along in the progression of the disease for the 'miracle' drugs to have any effect.

Information source: The Washington Post