A targeted campaign of testing and counseling aimed at those who are at high risk for HIV would be more effective than the mass patient screening proposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to an analysis by David Holtgrave, PhD, an expert on HIV prevention at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Holtgrave determined that the CDC’s testing strategy is likely to cost $864 million for one year. For the same price, a targeted testing and counseling approach would identify more than three times as many people with HIV and could prevent four times as many new HIV infections compared to the CDC’s testing strategy. Holtgrave’s study is the first to examine the cost-effectiveness of the CDC’s testing plan and is published in the June 2007 edition of the journal PLoS Medicine.
