Today, New York City health officials will launch an ambitious three-year plan to reduce the Bronx's high AIDS death rate by testing every adult in the borough for HIV.
While Manhattan has long had New York's highest incidence of HIV/AIDS, the Bronx, with its poorer population, has many more deaths from the disease. Public health officials say this is in part due to not enough people getting tested until it is too late to treat the virus effectively. City officials are pushing to make voluntary testing a routine part of health care in the Bronx.
"Routine would mean if you came into the emergency room for asthma or a broken leg, we test everyone for HIV, if they're willing," said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, New York City's health commissioner.
Official estimates show that 40 percent of the 830,000 people ages 18-64 in the Bronx have been tested for HIV in the past year. Around 250,000, or half the remainder, have never been tested, and the health department will focus on them first. Forty designated sites, including clinics, emergency rooms, community centers, universities and churches, will offer HIV testing. Dr. Monica Sweeney, an assistant health commissioner for HIV prevention, said the city will absorb the $12 cost of each test.
In a bid to make testing less intimidating, the city will distribute information on the 311 hot line and issue public service announcements. Tear-off sheets with addresses of testing centers will be placed in venues like check-cashing stores.
Dr. Donna Futterman, director of the adolescent AIDS program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, created a script for doctors that condenses 20 minutes of mandated counseling and consent into five minutes or less while still following state law. New York's consent law is among the nation's toughest, and for years Frieden and others have lobbied Legislators to overhaul it.
06/26/08
NEW YORK: Push in Bronx for HIV Test for All Adults
Source: New York Times:: Anemona Hartocollis; Courtesy of the CDC National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention