Quote of note:

One of the studies, by researchers at Duke and Stanford universities and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System in California, estimated that routine one-time testing of everyone would cut new infections each year by slightly more than 20 percent, and that every infected patient identified would gain an average of 18 months of life.

The other study, by Yale and Harvard researchers, found that testing people every three to five years would be cost effective for all but the lowest-risk people, like those who are celibate or are in monogamous heterosexual relationships. And even for those people, one-time testing was found to be cost effective.

Experts Want H.I.V. Testing for All Adults

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

By The Associated Press

In what would be a major shift in health policy, some experts are recommending that virtually all Americans be tested routinely for the AIDS virus, much as they are for cancer and other diseases.

Since the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980's, the government has recommended screening for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, only in big cities, where AIDS rates are high, and among members of high-risk groups, including gay men and drug addicts.

But two large federally financed studies found that the cost of routinely testing nearly all adults would be outweighed by a reduction in new infections and the opportunity to start patients on drug cocktails early, when they work best.

"Given the availability of effective therapy and preventive measures, it is possible to improve care and perhaps influence the course of the epidemic through widespread, effective and cost-effective screening," Dr. Samuel A. Bozzette, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California, San Diego, wrote in an editorial accompanying the studies, which appear today in The New England Journal of Medicine.