New York, NY –
People who are newly infected with HIV are much more contagious than people who’ve had the disease for a while, because in the first months, they don’t yet have antibodies. WNYC’s Fred Mogul reports on a new City Health Department program to identify these people and treat them before they can infect others.
REPORTER: The city estimates there are almost 5,000 new HIV infections each year, but detecting them early on is a challenge, because almost all HIV-AIDS testing looks for antibodies, and if they haven’t appeared yet, you test negative.
The city this week published results of a pilot program to screen directly for HIV through what are called “pooled nucleic acid tests”, which look for the virus itself. Out of 21,000 people screened, only 17 individuals were located with new infections. Dr. Susan Blank says that number might sound small, but it’s an important group:
BLANK: 17 acute cases of HIV has tremendous public health significance in terms of the impact we can have for preventing further spread from those 17 to their sex and needle-sharing partners.
REPORTER: People with these early infections aren’t likely to know it, because when they get sick, the symptoms look a lot like flu – fever, sore throat, muscle aches.
Dr. Blank says it’s better to prevent HIV transmission in the first place, but barring that, the findings of the pilot program suggest greater screening efforts and greater awareness-building could lead to more early detection of these very early, very contagious HIV infections. For WNYC, I’m Fred Mogul.
Fred Mogul has been covering healthcare and medicine for WNYC since 2002. His beat takes him to hospitals, community clinics, doctors offices, health agencies, public schools and research labs across the metropolitan area. His work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Time magazine and Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.
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