Prick your finger and wait 20 minutes. That’s all it takes now to determine — with 99.6 percent certainty — whether or not you are infected with HIV. For now, the Food and Drug Administration has approved OraQuick, a 20-minute HIV test that blows away the tricky, inconclusive, 10-minute test that has been sold for about the past 10 years.
For now, a clinical technician must perform the test. However, lawmakers are seeking ways around the legal obstacles that keep the test from being performed by social workers and other persons in non-clinical settings. The test is simple enough for almost any of these persons to execute: a testing stick is dipped into a tube of developing solution with a drop of blood, and there you have it. It’s like a home pregnancy test — one red line is a negative result for HIV, and two lines is positive, suggesting further clinical testing. Authorizing social workers and other non-clinical workers would give many more people the opportunity to be tested for HIV. As the disease progresses to near-epidemic proportions, the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approximates that nearly 25 percent of the 85,000 to 95,000 Americans afflicted with HIV don’t even know. Furthermore, at least 8,000 people each year never return to the clinics where they were tested to hear the report. If social workers could perform the tests in someone’s own home, perhaps they would be less reluctant to take the test and hear the results.
But there really is a time and place for everything. And the right place to learn that you are afflicted with a terminal illness will vary from person to person. But the average patient would probably be best suited to hear the news in a clinical setting, where doctors and counselors are trained in delivering such news and offering support and counseling in those particular circumstances.
Learning that you have a terminal illness often can impart more anguish than the ailment itself. Many times, patients will discontinue treatment, feeling it’s useless in a situation clearly headed for fatality. Therefore, it’s important to impart support to these persons, something that may not be feasible with a home HIV test as accurate as OraQuick’s.
So while the test affords more people a chance to detect whether or not they are afflicted with HIV, it doesn’t provide them the counseling and aid available in a clinical setting. Places the test is desired — and reasonably so — include the battlefields, for use by military personnel administering care; delivery rooms to ensure proper treatment for newborns; and in hospitals for people who have handled HIV-infected blood and patients.
Hence the test is useful — just as useful as a home pregnancy test. But if it reaches the public at the same liberty as home pregnancy tests, the results could be dangerous — finding out that you have a terminal illness is painful enough with the support that clinics and doctors present. How many women are distraught to discover they are pregnant in their own bathroom? And pregnancy is no life-threatening illness. For most people, the test is most constructive in the proper clinical setting, backed by a scaffold of assistance and guidance — not in the so-called comfort of one’s own home.