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medpundit |
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Friday, November 08, 2002But the test is so simple that Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson urged manufacturer OraSure Technologies Inc. to seek a waiver of that law allowing OraQuick to be sold in far more places - from small doctors' offices to mobile testing vans and maybe even HIV counselling centres staffed by social workers instead of health professionals. It sounds promising. According to company promos, it’s pretty accurate: In clinical studies performed to date on multiple specimen types covering approximately 950 HIV-positive and 1700 HIV-negative subjects, test sensitivity has been 100% and specificity has been 99.9%. That sounds a little too good to be true, and in fact, the FDA site says it’s 96% accurate, but it doesn’t break that down into sensitivity (the likelihood that it will detect the disease if you have it) and specificity (the likelihood that you have the disease if the test is positive.) Still, it would be nice to have a means of testing people quickly. As things stand now, a lot of people skip HIV testing because of the inconvenience of going to the lab or health department and because they don't want their health insurance company or employer to know they had it done. If they could elect to pay cash for a simple, inexpensive test, a lot more may submit to testing. posted by Sydney on 11/08/2002 06:47:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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