By Amy Zimmer
DNAinfo News Editor
MANHATTAN — New York followed in the footsteps of the rest of the nation this fall when it implemented new rules requiring all primary care and ER doctors to offer rapid HIV testing to all patients ages 13 to 64.
Now, as World AIDS Day is commemorated across New York, the city is trying to figure out additional ways to remove the stigma associated with HIV testing and get even more people screened.
The population most at risk for contracting the virus — young men — are also the least likely to visit the doctor, leading public health officials to consider the dentist's chair.
"We project there are between 12,000 to 40,000 people who don't know their status and we're hoping to get every one of them," said Monica Sweeney, the city health department's assistant commissioner for HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control. "By offering to test everybody, one of the big intended consequences is to decrease the stigma."
The city is closely watching a handful of dental clinics run by the Health and Hospitals Corporation that have already begun offering rapid HIV screenings. The rapid screenings use an oral swab test and the results come back in an hour, officials said — just as a tooth cleaning is winding down.
The Metropolitan Hospital Center on First Avenue and 97th Street started its program more than two years ago and currently averages 60 to 80 screenings a month, officials there said.
"It's sort of a natural fit," said Joseph Morales, chief of service at Metropolitan Hospital Center and chairman and professor of Clinical Dental Medicine at New York Medical College.
Morales thinks dentists can help make the HIV test feel less intrusive and anxiety inducing, since swabbing the mouth for the cells to test for HIV are very close to the other duties of a dentist.
"We are already working in a patient's mouth. They already expect our hands in there," Morales said. "If I were a patient, which I am, I'd like something relatively easy and inexpensive. It can be incorporated into a visit I'm having anyway."
Morales hopes his students will one day make screening a part of dentists' private practices. "Anywhere between one in four people with HIV don't know it," he said.
