Posts Tagged ‘CDC’

HIV Care System Is Getting Swamped

Friday, March 18th, 2011

The U.S. HIV care system is being swamped by a rising tide of new patients, an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report warns.

As HIV treatment continues to improve, people with HIV are living much longer. Meanwhile, the CDC’s universal HIV screening program is bearing fruit, identifying more people who are infected with the AIDS virus.

The result is a widening gap between the number of Americans with HIV and the resources available to treat them.

“Our system is getting stretched,” IOM panel chair Paul D. Cleary, PhD, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, tells WebMD. “There is going to be a dramatic change in the number of people with HIV detected and cared for. When we start treating this many more people … we find there are barriers to getting them into available treatment facilities.”

Over 20% of the 1.1 million Americans with HIV don’t know they are infected. Learning they have HIV is good for the individual, as earlier treatment means better health. It’s also good for society, as people who know they carry HIV are less likely to infect others — and treatment actually makes a person less infectious.

“There is a moral imperative that if we do testing, we have to get people who test positive into care,” Michael Saag, MD, tells WebMD.

But there’s a raft of problems with actually providing this care, notes Saag, director of AIDS research at the University of Alabama, Birmingham and immediate past president of the HIV Medicine Association.

Saag’s state-of-the-art AIDS clinic is a prime example. In 2000, the clinic was caring for 750 patients. Now the same clinic, with pretty much the same funding and same staff level, is caring for 1,800 patients. (more…)

CDC Urges New HIV Testing for Donors

Friday, March 18th, 2011

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending hospitals test living donors for the virus that causes AIDS no more than seven days before their organs are removed and transplanted, following the first documented U.S. case of HIV transmission from a live organ donor in more than two decades.

According to an investigation by the CDC and New York city and state health officials, a kidney transplant recipient contracted the virus from a donor in an unnamed New York City hospital in 2009. The male donor acknowledged that he had engaged in unprotected sex with another man after he was screened for HIV, but before he donated the organ. The New York hospital tested the donor 79 days before transplant, when he showed no evidence of infection, but did not re-test him closer to the surgery that removed the organ.

The centers’ 1994 guidelines for organ-donor screening, which are being revised, did not address the timing of screening tests.

The CDC is also recommending the use of a test that detects the virus within eight to 10 days of infection.

Of the three major transplant centers serving the city, Mount Sinai Medical Center said the event did not occur there; a spokesman for another, New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, said, “We don’t have any information about this.” New York University Langone Medical Center said that it would be “inappropriate” to comment. (more…)