Early diagnosis is 1 weapon in HIV battle, says Scottsdale health adviser
Feb 10, 2020, 7:05 AM | Updated: 7:11 am
Tri Lailatul, a lab technician at the Dharmais hospital in Jakarta, Indonesia, does a CD4 AIDS test on a blood sample July 8, 2004 in Jakarta, Indonesia. A recent report issued by the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS states that six provinces are now being classifed as badly affected with a serious increase in 2003 among drug users and sex workers. The 15th International AIDS conference will be held in Bangkok beginning next week. (Getty Images/Paula Bronstein)
(Getty Images/Paula Bronstein)
PHOENIX – President Trump is pushing a lofty goal for the country. He made this promise during one of his recent rallies:
“We’re going to end, within 10 years, the AIDS epidemic in our country,” he said.
“Who would have thought we’d advance that far?”
Buffy Lloyd-Krejci is the owner of IPC Well, a Scottsdale-based consulting firm that is dedicated to working with hospitals and health care settings to reduce the risk of people getting infections.
She is not an AIDS expert, and said the president’s goal may be hard to reach, but that we should try to attain it.
“Let’s do it. That’s reducing harm to the American public and to the world wide public,” she said.
Lloyd-Krejci said there is a lot of work to do.
“According to the (Centers for Disease Control), there’s still 40,000 infections annually, so we do have a long ways to go still.”
She said education was important when it comes HIV.
AIDSinfo from the National Institutes of Health said you can reduce your risk of getting HIV by getting tested, knowing your partner’s HIV status, choosing less risky sexual behaviors, limiting the number of sexual partners and using condoms.
There’s something else that’s pretty important.
“Early diagnosis is huge,” she said. “One out of every three people who are diagnosed with HIV have had it for at least three years.”
Lloyd-Krejci said there was hope in attaining Trump’s goal.
“If we can ramp up our health care system within our outpatient settings and empower and equip our practitioners to help detect the virus earlier, then we are definitely one step closer to eradicating the infection for sure,” she said.
