FRIDAY, Sept. 30, 2005 (HealthDay News) -- American doctors could save hundreds of lives annually by giving HIV tests to patients with fevers and other signs of viral illness, a new study suggests.
While only a tiny percentage of the sick patients would actually be ill because they're in the early stages of HIV infection, identifying the disease in these individuals could prevent them from infecting others, according to the study findings.
There's no indication that the U.S. medical establishment is anywhere near making HIV tests routine for people with routine symptoms. The tests themselves still carry a stigma. And doctors themselves often don't think about the prospect that their patients may be ill with the virus that causes AIDS, said study co-author Dr. Andrew Coco, head of the Healthcare Research Center at Lancaster General Hospital in Lancaster, Penn.
"This really isn't on their radar screen at all," he said.
Still, Coco said, changing the status quo could make a big difference, especially since "we're not cutting into the epidemic as we'd like to."
The study focused on patients with fever and other virus symptoms because as many as 90 percent of people infected with HIV will develop flu-like symptoms within days of being infected. The symptoms are a sign that the body has recognized the AIDS virus and is trying to kill it.
In some cases, the symptoms are so bad that patients go to a doctor. In his study, published in the September/October issue of the journal Annals of Family Medicine, Coco estimated that routine testing of 3 million patients would turn up 17,054 new cases of HIV infection. According to his calculations, timely recognition of these infections could spare about 435 of those individuals' sex partners from getting infected, too.
Based on an analysis of medical data from the year 2000, the calculations assumed that 0.66 percent -- or two-thirds of 1 percent -- of people with fever and related symptoms would be HIV positive.
The tests would be cost-effective, Coco said, although he acknowledged that the study's most promising results regarding cost relied on a $24 HIV test. Tests have since then gone up in price, he said.
"We spend a lot of money screening for a lot of other diseases, like breast cancer and colon cancer, and we do Pap smears," he said. "We wouldn't think of seeing patients and not screening for those."
By contrast, patients are only typically screened for HIV if they ask for a test or are identified at high risk and agree to be tested, said Gillian D. Sanders, an associate professor of medicine at Duke University.
In an accompanying commentary in the journal, Dr. Theodore G. Ganiats of the Health Outcomes Assessment Program at the University of California, San Diego, called Coco's work "impressive." But he added that questions still remain about the wisdom of making the HIV tests routine. Even so, doctors and researchers should take a close look at the study findings, he said.
And what about the negative perception that still surrounds HIV tests? "We hope that if HIV screening becomes more widespread in lower-risk populations that there will be less of a stigma involved with requesting a test or being tested," Sanders said.
More information
To learn about new rapid HIV tests, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
