This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

R. J. Simonds, MD; Brian R. Edlin, MD; Martha F. Rogers, MD
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Atlanta, Ga

JAMA. 1996;276(10):779-780.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.

—We share the interests of Drs Goldstein and Sever in promoting prenatal HIV testing. Indeed, the concern that many HIV-infected women and their children were not receiving needed care because their HIV infections remained undiagnosed was a primary impetus toward developing the US Public Health Service guidelines for the universal offering of prenatal HIV counseling and voluntary testing.¹ Our main disagreement with Goldstein and Sever is in the best way to accomplish this goal.

An often unspoken tenet of arguments and policies favoring mandatory prenatal HIV testing is that many women will not be tested if testing is voluntary. However, several studies have demonstrated that voluntary HIV testing programs can achieve high rates of testing and of initiating care.^2,3 To our knowledge, no data are available to assess whether mandatory testing can be an effective strategy for ensuring that HIV-infected women and their children receive appropriate care.

Prenatal . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?