Is the Calypte test considered a "quick test", with same day results?
U.S. Urges More Use of Quick HIV Test
By Mike Cooper
ATLANTA (Reuters) - Federal health officials said Thursday that expanded use of rapid tests for the AIDS virus could detect thousands more cases of HIV infection every year.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the tests now commonly used, while more precise, can take weeks to process and that many people who are tested never return to find out their results.
CDC researchers estimated that, in one year, almost 8,200 more people would learn they were HIV-infected if a commercially available 15-minute test was used at publicly funded test sites.
Almost 700,000 uninfected people would quickly learn their HIV status if the rapid test was used, instead of waiting weeks for the results of enzyme immunoassays currently used for HIV screening.
"The most important feature of this recommendation allows people to get their HIV test results on the same day that they are tested," said Dr. Bernard Branson of the CDC's Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention.
The drawback of using the quick test is that there would be about 8,300 false-positive cases every year, where the test indicates people are HIV-infected when they actually are not.
Researchers said the advantage of identifying more cases of HIV infection outweighed the "unnecessary anxiety" those 8,300 people would undergo as they waited a week or two for confirmatory tests to reveal if they were actually uninfected.
"Under the system that we were using in the past, when people were given no results, only about half of the people who were HIV-infected came back on their own, and the other half someone had to go out and find," Branson said.
"Even though they had been tested, they might have inadvertently been able to infect someone else before they found out" their test results, he said.
The agency said that counselors should tell people who test positive on the rapid test that they have a "good chance of being infected," but should await a confirmatory test. People with positive initial results were likely to return for confirmed results, the CDC said.
The CDC said that 10 percent of the approximately 25 million people tested for HIV every year in the United States were tested through publicly funded counseling and testing programs.
Until now, the U.S. Public Health Service has recommended an antibody test and a confirmatory test before individuals are given HIV test results.
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