Keepings teens safe from HIV
When it comes to HIV/AIDS the mantra has always been: get tested.
But some doctors warn that not all tests are created equal. Sometimes a negative test can give a false sense of security to both doctors and patients, particularly for risk-taking teenagers, said Dr. Allison Agwu, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.
Rapid HIV tests are designed to pick up antibodies to the virus, not the virus itself. It can take weeks or months for someone to produce antibodies. So a rapid test can come up negative the first time, but positive some weeks or months later. False negatives often happen during the earliest and most contagious stages of the infection.
And with teens, those crucial months matter.
“The test is only as good as when you get the test,” said Agwu. “I can’t tell you the number of times I spoke to a patient, and they say, ‘Well I’m negative. And they go on to doing whatever risky behaviors they’ve been doing.”
Of the 53,000 new HIV infections diagnosed each year in the United States, 14 percent of those occurred in 13 to 25-year-olds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
