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March 2016 (Volume 94)
Quarterly Article
David Merritt Johns
Ronald Bayer
Amy L. Fairchild
December 2024
Dec 19, 2024
Back to The Milbank Quarterly
Policy Points:
Context: In 1985, amid uncertainty about the accuracy of the new test for HIV, public health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and AIDS activists agreed that counseling should always be provided both before and after testing to ensure that patients were tested voluntarily and understood the meaning of their results. As the “exceptionalist” perspective that framed HIV in the early years began to recede, the purpose of HIV test counseling shifted over the next 30 years from emphasizing consent, to providing information, to encouraging behavioral change. With this increasing emphasis on prevention, HIV test counseling faced mounting doubts about whether it “worked.” The CDC finally discontinued its preferred test counseling approach in October 2014.
Methods: Drawing on key informant interviews with current and former CDC officials, behavioral scientists, AIDS activists, and others, along with archival material, news reports, and scientific and governmental publications, we examined the origins, development, and decline of the CDC’s “counseling and testing” paradigm for HIV prevention.
Findings: Disagreements within the CDC emerged by the 1990s over whether test counseling could be justified on the basis of efficacy and cost. Resistance to the prospect of policy change by supporters of test counseling in the CDC, gay activists for whom counseling carried important ethical and symbolic meanings, and community organizations dependent on federal funding made it difficult for the CDC to de-implement the practice.
Conclusions: Analyses of changes in public health policy that emphasize the impact of research evidence produced in experimental or epidemiological inquiries may overlook key social and political factors involving resistance to deimplementation that powerfully shape the relationship between science and policy.
Author(s): David Merritt Johns, Ronald Bayer, and Amy L. Fairchild
Keywords: HIV test, HIV infections, counseling, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Read on Wiley Online Library
Volume 94, Issue 1 (pages 126–162) DOI: 10.1111/1468-0009.12183 Published in 2016
