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WASHINGTON PLANS HIV TESTS FOR ALL RESIDENTS AGED 14 TO 84

Unprecedented campaign to test residents

The city of Washington will this week launch an unprecedented campaign to test every resident aged between 14 and 84 for the HIV virus.

The initiative, believed to be the most comprehensive in the history of the Aids epidemic, is part of a plan to make HIV testing as routine as getting a blood-pressure check in the city that has America's worst rate of new infections.

Clinics and doctors' surgeries will receive hundreds of thousands of free oral testing kits, which can indicate a person's HIV status within 20 minutes. The aim of the programme - which uses the motto "Come Together DC, Get Screened for HIV" - is to ensure that "all Washington DC residents know their HIV status by December 31 2006".

According to official estimates, nearly 180 new cases of HIV are reported per 100,000 residents each year, while the equivalent figure for the average US state is just 15. About one in 50 Washington residents are believed to be infected.

"If we are serious about addressing this epidemic in our community then screening for HIV has to become routine," Marsha Martin, the city official in charge of the programme, told the Washington Post. "Because we'll miss too many people otherwise ... We have to start making it part of the public consciousness, that HIV is of and among us."

Local Aids workers expressed concerns that a greater level of awareness would have to be matched with more resources for counselling and treatment. Ms Martin promised that these would be forthcoming, along with an expansion of the city's needle-exchange programmes.

The national US Centres for Disease Control reported last week that the saliva-based test, thanks to its speedy result, has proved an important catalyst in encouraging people to get tested. "It has enabled diagnosis of HIV in persons who might not have had their infections diagnosed otherwise," the researchers announced.

SOURCE: The Guardian UK newspaper, 26/JUN/06


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