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The Fight Against HIV: Resistance Testing Making The Decision To Start HIV Therapy

HIV and AIDS

Fast and Easy HIV Testing

Summary & Participants

Tests that can rapidly detect HIV are an important advancement in the fight against HIV and AIDS. Will these fast and easy tests lead to greater screening?

Medically Reviewed On: July 21, 2009

Webcast Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Although HIV and AIDS has received a lot of attention over the last two decades, many people have never been tested for HIV antibodies. And simply knowing whether or not you’re infected remains one of the greatest weapons in fighting the spread of the HIV virus.

JEFFREY LAURENCE, MD: In the United States where upwards of a million people are infected, it's estimated that somewhere between a third and maybe 40 to 50 percent don't know they're infected with the virus.

It's important to know that you're HIV positive for two reasons. One, you want to be able to protect your lovers, protect your partners, protect, perhaps, your baby, if you're pregnant. But a second very important reason is we now have very effective therapies that you can take if you're infected.

ANNOUNCER: In the past, it was thought that only groups of people who were considered high-risk needed to be screened. But the current thinking is that everyone should be tested for HIV.

JEFFREY LAURENCE, MD: Virtually anyone can be at risk for this virus. So we'd like to take testing out of the realm of only something that we do under very limited situations for very limited groups of people and we offer it as a standard test in hospitals or in a doctor's office, at least a test that your doctor should discuss with you.

ANNOUNCER: There are two major classes of HIV tests.

JEFFREY LAURENCE, MD: What most people commonly refer to as an HIV test or, colloquially, as an AIDS test is a test for antibodies to the virus. And, in this disease, unlike virtually any other disease, if you have antibodies to the virus, you have that virus active in your blood.

The second type of test is testing for the virus itself. Those tests are a bit more complicated. They're usually only done if we already know that you have antibodies against the virus and we want to measure how much virus do you have floating around in your blood.

ANNOUNCER: The standard HIV tests were first developed in 1985, and while highly accurate, they are also time consuming.

JEFFREY LAURENCE, MD: If someone requests a test for HIV or a physician orders one, there's first, some pretest counseling that is done.

Then, typically, a blood sample is drawn. And you go through a waiting period. That waiting period, depending on the clinic may be anywhere from a week to two weeks. And during that period of time, a screening test is done known as an ELISA test, which tests for antibodies against the virus itself. And, if that test is negative, then no further testing is done.

If that test turns out to be positive, it's incredibly important for the laboratory to determine if that's a true positive or just some false positive, and that second test is called a Western blot.

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