Home Testing Kit for HIV Now Available
Just like a pregnancy in home test kit, anyone can now pick up a HIV test that will let users know if they have the HIV virus. Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, it is the first at-home rapid test.
“If it becomes a community norm, people may start testing their partners,” said Alex Carballo-Dieguez, the lead author of the study, a Columbia University professor and the associate director of the H.I.V. Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. See http:www.newyorktimes/10/5/12/Another Use for Rapid Home H.I.V. Test: Screening Sexual Partners
Advantages of OraQuick
- Less waiting time – only 20 minutes.
- Sexual History kept private.
- Can Screen sexual partner as well (with second box).
- Don’t have to go to medical unit for testing.
- Test is estimated to correctly identify about 45,000 HIV-positive diagnoses per year, preventing another 4,000 new transmissions.
- Ease of use with swab.
- 70% of 4,000 men and women in clinical trials said they would most likely use OraQuick for screening.
Disadvantages of OraQuick
- Price. It costs around $60.00.
- Accuracy rate of about 93%. This equals 3,800 missed HIV-positive diagnoses each year. Possible that person has virus, though the body is not yet producing the antibodies that the test detects.
- Hard to insist that partners take test.
- Only study of the practice involved small population: 27 gay men who frequently had anonymous unprotected sex..
- People who refuse to take test would refuse to wear condoms.
- Test could have false negatives resulting in forgoing condoms that prevent STDs.
- Sexually active men and women don’t always reveal HIV status.
Other HIV Breakthrough
This fall saw another breakthrough, a FDA-approved tablet that fuses four drugs into one pill. Called Stribild, previously known as Quad, the pill, manufactured by Gilead, combines elvitegavir, cobicistat, emtricitabine, and tenofovir disoproxil fumaarate into a single daily dose.
Expensive, the cost of this single pill is about $7,000 more than Gilead’s combination drug Atripla, approved in 2006.
