If women can take a pregnancy test at home and get an answer within minutes, shouldn’t individuals be able to take a rapid HIV test in the privacy of their home, too?That’s the question facing U.S. health officials who will soon debate how Americans can get the news about whether they’re infected with the AIDS virus. On Nov. 3, a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel will begin considering whether to let OraSure Technologies Inc. sell its OraQuick test over the counter. The tests, which have become extremely popular in just a year, are now available at doctors’ offices for $12 to $17 each.For years, health officials assumed that an AIDS diagnosis was too stressful for patients to handle outside the confines of a doctor’s office or health clinic. In many cases, doctors made extensive counseling available because of worries that people would commit suicide after receiving an HIV diagnosis.But things have changed over the years. Thanks to powerful drugs developed in the early 1990s, AIDS has become more of a chronic -- though still deadly -- disease. Concerns remained, however, about how people would handle news of an HIV diagnosis, said Thomas Coates, an AIDS specialist and professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.
