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The test, called OraQuick Advance, requires a simple swab of the gums. Results appear within 20 minutes.
It's already being used in clinics in the U.S. Proponents say the test could draw out the estimated 300,000 or more Americans who live with H-I-V but don't know about it. These people cause sixty five percent of all new H-I-V infections in the U.S. each year.
Noel Alicea works for the advocacy group Gay Men's Health Crisis.
NOEL ALICEA
We think it's important for there to be a lot of different options for people to know their status. Over the last few years we've seen different technologies become available that have made the test faster and easier for people, // they don't have to go somewhere and get their results and wait a week later.
NARRATION
But some AIDS outreach workers worry about what will happen when people test positive at home -- without the counseling they could get in clinics.
Don Culberston is a physician assistant, who works for an adolescent HIV program.
DON CULBERSTON
It's difficult for us to speculate how people might respond to a home kit to find out they're positive.// There's no substitute to human compassion and being with another person when you hear something.// People need to be given a message of hope. Not false message or false hope, but real knowledge and education that they can live with a virus, with HIV and that it's not necessarily an immediate association with death.
NARRATION
Proponents of home testing say people who know they're infected are less likely to transmit H-I-V.
But Culberston says research shows just the opposite.
DON CULBERSTON
We know that 60% of HIV positive people do nothing to change their sexual behavior to protect themselves or their partners. // I am concerned that people who receive at home test without much guidance or direction, or support I think, might not make these changes as well.
NARRATION
Advocates also believe that home testing will reduce the stigma and other obstacles that prevent many people from finding out whether they're H-I-V positive and starting treatment.
But many AIDS professionals, including Doctor Anthony Vavasis of Callen Lorde community health center, have their doubts about home testing's ability to make great strides in reducing H-I-V transmission.
ANTHONY VAVASIS
It's really important as a society that we look at the broader issues of why people don't get tested and why they don't know their status. And I think it has to do with poverty, racism, and homophobia, and more generally power. And I think people who are disempowered are the people who are less likely to test because it has greater consequence in their minds and in society. Are they the ones who are going to order the home test? I don't know.
NARRATION
The F-D-A could approve the test as it is, reject it for home use, or approve it with modifications - for example by asking the manufacturer to include a booklet that gives users more context.
Tamara Rosenberg, Columbia Radio News.