HIV testing

HIV testing features

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  Happy families

  Sally Farthing is an HIV specialist midwife at West Middlesex Hospital in Isleworth, west London. She praises the measures – and the mothers – who together have sent...

  From:HIV treatment update

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  "How can the world accept us if we don't?" Improving testing rates in the UK African community

  HIV testing and late diagnosis rates in the UK African community will not improve unless we look at the wider reasons people don’t test, a community meeting...

  From:HIV treatment update

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  Don’t live in ignorance: how do we expand HIV testing?

  Should everyone take an HIV test? Gus Cairns investigates. ...

  From:HIV treatment update

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  Test early, test often…how could the UK improve its HIV testing rates?

  Although rates are improving, gay men in the UK still take HIV tests less often than their counterparts in comparable countries, and nearly half of African men with...

  From:HIV treatment update

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  Scaling up HIV testing and counselling towards universal access: what works in resource-limited settings?

  This issue looks at the diverse possibilities and challenges for expanding HIV testing and counselling as well as policy and practice in resource-poor settings. ...

  From:HIV & AIDS treatment in practice

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  Universal testing and immediate treatment could cut HIV infections by 95% in 10 years

  This issues looks at  WHO's modelling study proposing universal testing and immediate treatment could cut HIV infections by 95% in 10 years in a generalised...

  From:HIV & AIDS treatment in practice

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  Main article: Making the world safe for more routine HIV testing

  Review of issues surrounding recommednations for more routine HIV antibody testing in resource-limited settings, including human rights arguments and proposals for mandatory testing, as well...

  From:HIV & AIDS treatment in practice

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  Routine or opt-out counselling and testing: findings from the 2006 PEPFAR meeting

  Review of the issues involved in expanding HIV counselling and testing in resource-limited settings....

  From:HIV & AIDS treatment in practice

HIV testing in your own words

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  A senior moment: sero-conversion late in life

  I’m a senior citizen and a gay man living with HIV. I’m not the only gay HIVer of my generation, of course, but I’m perhaps different from...

  From:In your own words

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  Fifteen years on

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  From:In your own words

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  Better off knowing

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  From:In your own words

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  Seroconversion

  I was given my diagnosis over the telephone after spending four days in hospital with meningitis. I now realise it wasn’t meningitis, it was an...

  From:In your own words

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  Finding out

  The day was 9th of November, 2009; I was having my college lesson on the concepts of computer script languages – what a day it...

  From:In your own words

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  Finding a better place

  I am in a much better place now than I was before HIV. To explain, I need to take you back to those days before the diagnosis....

  From:In your own words

HIV testing news from aidsmap

• Rapid HIV test performance poorer with oral fluid than blood, especially when prevalence is low

  The performance of OraQuick, a widely used rapid point-of-care test for HIV diagnosis, is slightly poorer when testing oral fluid samples than when testing blood samples, according to a meta-analysis published in the online edition of Lancet Infectious Diseases this ...

  25 January 2012 | Roger Pebody

• Home-based counselling and testing identifies people in need of treatment earlier

  Home-based HIV counselling and testing (HBCT) was shown to be the most effective gateway for getting those who tested HIV-positive into care at an early stage of HIV disease, before they became ill, compared to voluntary counselling and testing (VCT), ...

  10 January 2012 | Carole Leach-Lemens

• Rapid ‘combination’ test fails to detect many cases of acute HIV infection

  A rapid, point-of-care test, which aims to reduce the ‘window period’ through the detection of both antibodies and p24 antigen has poor performance in a clinical setting, researchers report in an article published online ahead of print by the ...

  06 January 2012 | Roger Pebody

• Model shows excellent prognosis for UK gay men with HIV

  New UK research provides further evidence of the dramatic impact of antiretroviral therapy on the prognosis of HIV-positive patients. Published in the online edition of AIDS, a simulated model showed that a non-smoking, 30-year-old gay man, whose HIV is ...

  21 November 2011 | Michael Carter

• Testing people with conditions suggesting HIV could pick up more recent infections, Europe-wide study finds

  A pilot study in 14 European countries, in which groups of patients presenting with one of eight conditions strongly associated with HIV were routinely tested for HIV in various medical settings, found an HIV prevalence rate of 1.8%. This is ...

  14 October 2011 | Gus Cairns

• Over half of all new HIV diagnoses in Barcelona are late

  Over half of all new HIV diagnosis in the Spanish city of Barcelona are late, according to research published in the online journal AIDS Research and Therapy. Between 2001 and 2009 approximately 56% of patients at the time ...

  23 August 2011 | Michael Carter

• Steady HIV infection rate in the US conceals large increases in young gay and black men

  About 50,000 adults a year are being infected with HIV in the US, a new estimate by the country’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) revealed today in an article in the open-access journal PLoS One. This infection rate, equating to ...

  04 August 2011 | Gus Cairns

• Testing project using social networks in rural Tanzania effective in identifying people with undiagnosed infection

  A pilot project in which people with HIV encouraged their friends and neighbours to be tested for HIV succeeded in recruiting people with a very high rate of undiagnosed HIV, Elizabeth Reddy of Duke University told the Sixth International ...

  19 July 2011 | Roger Pebody

• People diagnosed with HIV who have never accessed medical care are often dissatisfied with post-test counselling

  A qualitative study conducted with people who have tested HIV-positive but never had HIV medical care in the United States has found that many of these individuals had poor experiences with testing, counselling and referral services. Health professionals were ...

  29 June 2011 | Roger Pebody

• Invitation to test for HIV ups test rate among male partners of pregnant women in South Africa

  Providing pregnant women with a written invitation to test for HIV for their male sexual partners significantly increased the numbers of males attending HIV voluntary counselling and testing at antenatal clinics (ANC) compared to those invited for pregnancy information sessions ...

  21 June 2011 | Carole Leach-Lemens

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HIV testing news selected from other sources

• Many Gay Men Would Support 'Home HIV Test': Study

  Many gay men who regularly have risky sex would be willing to ask partners to use a new, rapid-result HIV test, a new study shows. The tests, which use a mouth swab and detect HIV antibodies in less than 20 minutes, are currently used in testing clinics across the United States.

  10 February 2012 | U.S. News & World Report

• HIV+? Don't worry, some UAE clinics will not tell the authorities

  Many clinics suspected of not informing health authority about positive cases.

  06 February 2012 | Emirates 24/7

• Chembio, OraSure vie over Over The Counter HIV tests

  Even as a Pennsylvania-based company made news last month by advancing toward approval for an over-the-counter HIV test, a Long Island company is making strides with its own version of the test.

  03 February 2012 | Long Island Business News

• Kenya: Shortage of HIV Test Kits Raises Concerns

  Voluntary counselling and testing centres around Kenya are turning people away due to a shortage of HIV testing kits after the recall in December of more than one million faulty HIV tests.

  27 January 2012 | IRIN Plus News

• Rapid HIV Test Results Better With Blood

  A rapid HIV test gives slightly less exact results when used with oral samples than with blood samples, researchers reported.

  25 January 2012 | MedPage Today HIV/AIDS

• Testing for HIV together, hearing results together

  Newly dating and slightly anxious, two men bared their arms for blood tests and pondered the possibility that one of them, or both, could be infected with HIV. An innovative program — called Testing Together — would allow them to hear their test results minutes later, while sitting side by side.

  18 January 2012 | SFGate

• Jamaica - More Jamaicans getting tested for HIV, STIs

  THE Ministry of Health's National HIV/STI programme has seen a marked increase in the number of persons getting tested for HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) -- which causes the AIDS -- and other sexually transmitted infections.

  14 January 2012 | Jamaica Observer

• Ineffective HIV kit not being used in Uganda

  The Uganda's health ministry has confirmed that Bioline, the rapid test kit for HIV/AIDS which has been blacklisted by the World Health Organization (WHO) for being ineffective, is not being used in Uganda. go →

  11 January 2012 | Key Correspondents

• CDC: 22.6% of Sexually Active Teenagers Are Tested for HIV

  Less than a quarter of teenagers who have had sex have been tested for HIV, according to researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who published their findings online January 2 in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.

  05 January 2012 | Medscape (requires registration)

• False positive HIV tests: the problem no one wants to talk about (and how to solve it)

  I first came across this unpleasant reality in Bukavu, DRC while working as a medical coordinator for MSF in 2005. We came to realize that some people in our program did not have HIV, so we re-tested a number of them—and identified almost 50 who were suspect for false positive HIV diagnosis. This news was devastating, considering the consequences a false diagnosis can have on people’s lives.

  03 January 2012 | PLoS Blogs

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