WHY SHOULD YOU GET TESTED FOR HIV

Jul,24,2020

Recent studies conducted by many experts have revealed that over 200,000 American citizens are HIV positive, but only a few of them know that they are suffering from this dangerous illness. This means that a number of HIV infected persons may be spreading the disease without their knowledge.

Making HIV testing a routine process will certainly solve this issue. This is the reason why many health care providers and medical practitioners advise people to undergo an HIV testing. If you doubt that you have fallen prey to this severe illness, then you should immediately undergo a test and take the necessary precautions. Besides, taking an early HIV test helps to diagnose the issue at an early stage (that is, before HIV gets transformed it to full blown AIDS), which will make sure that you don’t spread the disease to your loved ones or to anyone else.

Many health care centers are determined to stop the spread of this disease by making HIV testing a lot more accessible to people of every race, sexual orientation, and age. In fact, testing for HIV has become a lot more convenient and faster over the last few years and there are plenty of options available to you currently.

THE DIFFERENT TESTS FOR HIV

When HIV affects someone, their immune system develops antibodies to fight and overcome the infection. Most of the HIV tests that you find today actually test for HIV antibodies. If the tests reveal that there are HIV antibodies on his/her immune system, then we can conclude that the person is HIV infected.

On the other hand, there is another HIV test, that is capable of detecting the HIV virus itself, and it is commonly known as RNA test. It is significant to not that RNA testing are much less common and they are a lot more expensive when compared to other HIV tests. However, RNA testing is capable of detecting HIV much earlier than all other antibody tests.

Other HIV tests available to you include oral swab and blood tests for diagnosing HIV infection. There are also urine tests for HIV, although health care providers and medical practitioners rarely use them. No matter what the test is, the procedure and results will be kept confidential and revealed only to the person, or as requested by him/her.

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    About the Author

    Dr. Ghassan M. Al-Jazayrly, MD

    A graduate of University of Aleppo Faculty of Medicine, Dr. Al-Jazayrly or, as he is colloquially known: Dr. AJ, is an oncologist and hematologist of a Complete Care Community Health Center (CCCHC) with more than 36 years of experience. In recent years, he’s been involved with a non profit organization known as Every Woman Counts (EWC) which provides free breast and cervical cancer screening and diagnostic services to California’s underserved populations in order to eliminate health disparities for low-income individuals.

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