For Immediate Release
Media Contact:
Justin Burke - 213.201.1525
AIDS PROJECT LOS ANGELES QUESTIONS FEDERAL GUIDELINES ON HIV TESTING
Scarce Resources Make Routine Testing Empty Promise
Los Angeles, Calif., September 21, 2006 – AIDS Project Los Angeles today announced support for new federal guidelines to test all Americans for HIV while questioning who will pay for the tests and whether cost of the initiative will deplete already inadequate HIV/AIDS funding.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) wants all Americans between the ages of 13 and 64 to be tested for HIV,” said APLA Executive Director Craig Thompson. “We’re talking about hundreds of millions of people, and the CDC has been vague at best about who will pay for these tests.”
The CDC guidelines, in the works for months, were released today in a nationwide conference call with the agency’s community partners. The new guidelines apply only to health care settings, and include consent for HIV tests as part of general medical consent. Previously, HIV tests required written consent.
“Routine HIV tests are an important strategy,” Thompson said, “but we can’t test our way out of this epidemic. If we don’t get more money for prevention, care and treatment, we will end up with a lot of people who know they’re HIV-positive but don’t know what to do about it or where to get the care, treatment and services they need.”
The CDC estimates that over one million Americans are HIV-positive, nearly a quarter of whom do not know their HIV status. According to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, the U.S. federal government spent a total of $19.8 billion on HIV/AIDS last year, including global funding and cash and housing assistance, of which five percent was devoted to prevention education.
“This mandate would require at least an additional $6 billion, yet the federal government has cut domestic funding for care, treatment and services over the past five years,” Thompson said. “Conducting millions of HIV tests without appropriating the money for follow up care is an empty promise.”
Thompson also cautioned the CDC to rethink the effect of HIV testing in private health care settings.
“The CDC wants private insurers to pay for some of this testing,” Thompson said. “But people may want to think twice about billing their insurance companies for an HIV test, positive or negative. This is just the kind of information that may make it harder -- or unaffordable – for people to buy private health insurance of any sort.”
The CDC has said that money for the testing will come from a variety of public sources, including the states and the federal government, and from private insurers.
AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA), one of the largest non-profit AIDS service organizations in the United States, provides bilingual direct services, prevention education and leadership on HIV/AIDS-related policy and legislation. Founded by four friends in 1982, APLA is a community-based, volunteer-supported organization with local, national and global reach. For more information, visit www.apla.org.###
