CHINA’s top health authorities are mulling fine-tuning the guidelines for HIV tests next year to ensure that people with the disease can begin antiretroviral treatment (ART) as early as possible, and attain life expectancies similar to those of healthy people, the country’s leading HIV/AIDS specialist has said.

    Wu Zunyou, head of the National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, made the remarks Saturday at a media event ahead of World AIDS Day.

    The National Health and Family Planning Commission issued new treatment guidelines in April, requiring ART for patients whose CD4 count falls below 500. Before the new guidelines, the figure was 350. CD4 cells are white blood cells that help fight infection, with a range of 500 cells per cubic millimeter of blood in HIV/AIDS patients to 1,200 cells in healthy people.

    Wu Hao, director of the department of infectious diseases at the You An Hospital in Beijing, said that 80 percent of patients who start their treatment late, with a CD4 count below 500, will suffer an impaired and irreversibly low level of immunity.

    To improve the chances of early treatment, Wu’s department has been piloting a new testing strategy that offers gay men with AIDS/HIV a course of ART after two so-called rapid tests — usually conducted with dipsticks or swabs — both confirm that the patient is HIV-positive, he said.

    Rapid tests can indicate a person’s HIV status within 10 minutes, and the test kit is widely available at both brick-and-mortar and online drugstores.

    However, most treatment sites in China offer ART only after lab-based confirmation, but “that can take as long as six months in some remote areas,” said Wu Hao.

    Under the new guidelines, the time lapse between diagnosis and the start of ART treatment at the You An Hospital is only about two weeks, a drop from about two months, he said. So far this year, more than 1,000 patients have started ART at the hospital, and at least 80 percent asked for early treatment if possible.

    Peter Reis, vice president of the AHF, said the pilot is aimed at changing the testing policy in China. Wu Zunyou said such pilots had been already conducted in China’s worst-hit areas, such as Yunnan Province. However, fearing potentially inaccurate results, some AIDS doctors are reluctant to conduct the tests, he added.(SD-Agencies)