French screening

Read in the paper today, this article about AIDS. The debate is still open. I sincerely think all this story is very dangerous. It allows everyone to know your status and be able to do anything with it, for example starting chase. To fight AIDS, "goes towards a screening of all the French population from 15 to 70 years ". The proposition is new. Some years ago, this suggestion would have provoked the sarcasm, even the dismay. Today, It is on the table. It is indeed the key recommendation of a report on the "screening of the infection by the HIV in France" that the High authority of health ( HAS) has just finished. Until now, this serious institution - it is the highest sanitary authority in France on the questions of medical practices and evaluation - had accustomed to be careful, and took even harmless positions. This time, It suggests a real turnover in the policy of screening of AIDS. Until now, no other decision provided good results. The situation is indeed paradoxical : in France, we make out a will a lot, but we make out a will badly. "Although the activity of screening is particularly important in France - 5 million tests in 2007, placing France in the second world rank-, it persists a delay in the screening which concerns more particularly some group of populations or individuals ", notes the HAS. Example: over the period 1997-2005, " 47 % of the subjects for which a diagnosis of AIDS was carried, presented a delay to the screening ". A large number of patients discover their infection while this one is already very advanced. This delay is particularly significant for the person of more than 40 years, for the persons of foreign origin and, finally, for the persons who were contaminated by heterosexual way. And this delay is heavy of consequences, at first for the very person: " The screening allows the premature institution of an antiretroviral treatment. In the end, as notes it the HAS, we estimate at more than 40 000 the number of infected persons who ignore that they are HIV+. Every year, there is between 6 000 and 7 000 contagions, but that nothing really changes. In brief, the epidemic is by no means in the stop. The balance sheet is bad. " The current device of screening suffers of a significant number of incapacities ", insists the HAS. The reasons ? Until now, this device was filled with the first years of the epidemic " where the risks of stigmatization and discrimination against the person living with the AIDS were particularly important and where the individual profits of the screening were limited ". Where from, at the time, the creation of the units of anonymous and free screening ( CDAG) exist almost everywhere in France. More generally in the population, if the screening was proposed at some key moments of life, as during a pregnancy, It remained connected to a risk-taking. It is this model which the HAS wants to modify. As far as treatments profoundly changed the face of the disease. Taken in time, these treatments work well, even very well, and a HIV-positive person, following faithfully its therapy, has a low risk of contaminating sound or his (her) partner. You should not certainly establish a systematic screening, but it is necessary to propose it, more and more systematically. To reach there, the HAS proposes a coherent strategy: " mobilize strongly the actors of health over a definite period of time ". In particular, the general practitioners, but also the hospitable actors. More innovative, the HAS opens the way to more individual practices. It proposes that every person can go to a laboratory of medical analysis to be made out a test without prescription ". For all that, " it will be to the biologist who made the test to inform the patient ", specifies the report. "Any diagnosis of a new infection, adds report, has to be translated by an orientation towards an adapted medical care. " Finally, this new device " will have to be the object of an evaluation in five years This report, in any case, is from now on on the desk of Minister of Health. In some weeks, Roselyne Bachelot should receive the report on the new methods of prevention. About thirty years after the arrival of the virus in France, it opens a real opportunity to change gives it.