2016 HIV Diagnostics Conference Opens - HIV testing 101

The Conference opened with a broad based plenary looking at the new landscape in HIV, often referred to as the HIV Testing 101 Workshop. This is a two hour session which will be on line shortly and really is an excellent overview. It starts out with a glossary of terms and then moves through technology; performance; programs; surveillance and the relationship between laboratory and strategy.

I strongly recommend that anyone setting out into the world of testing watch this session. The slides will all be up on the website some time after the conference and we will advise when this happens.

The USA has recently introduced a change algorithm for HIV diagnostic testing. This raises practical issues for laboratories. But an equally important issue for this conference is how laboratories support initiatives to increase testing (and timeliness of testing) and improve the care continuum.

Details can be found on the website http://hivtestingconference.org  

Key HIV Testing Issues

Key issues in this meeting are how to get testing done early enough and also how to use the best test on an early-after-exposure sample. This will likely play out over the next few days. Clearly the cognitive distance between the laboratory and the clinic is narrowing here. Labs are trying to play a role in the clinical improvements that are sought in reducing the time between exposure and testing. Yet with the increase of self testing, and large scale community clinics with the capacity to perform more complex tests, the laboratory is coming much closer to the community.

With this comes the big question for me: How does one get this information to the person needing testing, at the time that they need it? The Achilles heal in any algorithm would seem to be the differentiation of the population upon which it is performed.

Joanne Stekler (Seattle) discussed this in the breakfast session today. Indicating that the greatest variation between yield on different tests is how differentiated the sample is.  Population-based screening is low yield in low prevalence settings and yield rises dramatically when more targeted testing is performed.

Increased infectivity during seroconversion and early in infection mean it is vitally important to get people to test during this period. Though this has not been discussed here yet, the role of PEP in this context should be reconsidered.