Quote from Howard Aaron Aronow, MD
by draronow 6.25.09
Every 9 and a half minutes another person becomes HIV positive in the United States. AIM provides state-of-the-art testing and counseling for HIV and all STD’s and we encourage our clients to test frequently.
The vast majority of our clients have repeat HIV and STD testing every 1-2 months. While we do our best to prevent new cases of HIV infection, we can not prevent all new cases amongst our clientele.
Recently, we have had an isolated case of a new HIV infection. Using our rapid detection protocol combining standardly used tests know as the HIV ELISA and more sophisticated tests known as the Proviral-DNA HIV PCR Qualitative assay, we are able to rapidly identify very new infections before most other medical facilities.
Through our confidential, dynamic partner notification system, we offer immediate testing and counseling to all individuals who have been exposed to and are at potential risk for developing HIV when one of our clients happens to test HIV positive. We go well above and beyond standard epidemiologic partner notification and test 3 generations of partners for HIV.
This means that we test our HIV positive client’s partners and regardless of the results, we quickly test the partner’s partners and we even go so far as to test the 3rd generation of the original partner’s partner’s partners.
With regard to this isolated case of a single client testing HIV positive, all of the three generations of partners have tested HIV negative to date. These results underscore the need for remaining calm and exemplify the assurance that our counseling and testing methods are extremely effective at keeping our clients safe and healthy.