Thursday, February 10, 2005

Medicine: should everyone get an HIV test?

Previous medical conventional wisdom said that testing everyone for HIV was silly because of the insane number of false positive tests (lots of 50 year old monogamous women w/ no IV drug use or history of transfustion getting a positive back) and the costs of following up on those tests would outweight any health benefit of a massive screening program. But two new studies in the NEJM suggest that the benefits of a mass screening program, allowing prevention of transmission and earlier dispensing of anti-retroviral cocktails and such, would more than outweigh the costs of the program. Want medicine to change? Blink!

No comments: