HIV Counseling and Testing Protocol Posted on January 20, 2009 Dr. José Szapocznik explains the interaction of a particular study with public policy.

Right now we're leading another protocol that's very exciting to us. It's an HIV counseling and testing protocol. So this is a very high-risk population, particularly in certain communities where the prevalence of HIV is higher. So bringing HIV testing to drug treatment agencies is very important because it's a captive population. It's the right place to have it.

But also, we're very interested in that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued guidelines for medical settings suggesting that HIV testing can be done without counseling, and there is no scientific evidence for that.

And there is concern about what the guidelines will look like for non-medical settings, which will include many outpatient drug abuse treatment programs. And so we want to provide some data to determine whether the CDC guidelines make sense as well as provide some data before they come out with the new guidelines for non-medical settings.

So we've developed a study, one of our investigators at our site, Dr. Lisa Metsch, that's really at the cutting edge of public health policy at this point to determine whether in fact counseling, even though it may be very brief, one hour, has a beneficial effect in getting individuals to accept being tested as well as a longer-term effect of reducing sexual or drug, any kind of HIV risk behaviors, as well as looking at the impact of offering HIV testing in drug treatment settings.

So it's a study that we're very excited about because the policy issues are just very much at the cutting edge of where the country is now.