AIDS Action Committee’s Blog

With its latest guidelines for HIV testing which do away with pre-test counseling the CDC has moved further away from successful prevention strategies.

Pre-test counseling has always been an opportunity to educate people about HIV risks.  The availability of this information in the course of routine health care has been especially important for certain populations not likely to tap into established HIV/AIDS networks, especially young people of either sexual orientation and closeted gay men. Counseling has also been critical for people who test negative as it might be their only chance to get this information.  The CDC, however, has decided that counseling is a barrier to testing.

It’s unclear when health education became a barrier to health care but it probably started around the same time that the federal government started discouraging frank discussions about sex, particularly gay sex, and drug use.

Sadly, like so much else in the federal government these days, public policy is driven by ideology, not fact (for example, the 2003 controversy over National Park Service’s  sale of A Different View, a creationist book arguing that the Grand Canyon was formed by approximately 5000 years ago by Noah’s flood, as opposed to 5 or 6 million years ago as agreed to by scientists).

Instead of encouraging proven prevention interventions like frank messages targeted to discrete populations, the CDC argues for an unproven strategy of test ‘em,  medicate ‘em and track ‘em.  Although this might be comforting to authoritarian federal bureaucrats, it leaves many of the rest of us deeply troubled.