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"Knowing is better"

ARKANSAS - On Thursday, Arkansas Department of Health officials said they received approval to divert $390,000 of unused federal Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS program funds for 2003 to shore up the department's AIDS Drug Assistance Program. ADOH said in December that without cuts, ADAP would run $159,074 short by March, the end of its funding period.

      ADOH will redirect the housing funds to prevent the planned cut of as many as 100 clients from ADAP, which provides medication to 406 low-income HIV/AIDS patients. Before it received permission to access the housing funds, ADOH had decided to cut 65 ADAP clients by Feb. 1 and shift them to charity patient assistance programs run by drug manufacturers. If more funding had not been found by Feb. 1, an additional 30 to 35 patients would have been cut from ADAP.

     Gov. Mike Huckabee's office declined requests to use any of his $500,000 discretionary fund to supplement ADAP. On Thursday, ADOH officials said that they will request $1.2 million over the next two years from the state legislature, which convenes Jan. 10.

     Officials said ADAP woes were unrelated to questionable, inappropriate or insufficiently documented expenditures recently uncovered in an internal audit of the department's AIDS division. Instead, officials blamed the squeeze on increasing drug costs for patients who are living longer. Arkansas now has 30 patients on a waiting list for ADAP, said Jerry Jones, leader of ADOH's infectious-disease unit.

     "It's too bad that with the long waiting list that the housing funds are having to be diverted into medication funds," said Sandra Wilson, executive director of the Arkansas Supportive Housing Network, which contracts with ADOH to provide housing. The unused housing funds for 2003 could have been used to alleviate the housing waiting list, said Wilson, which stands now at about 50 people.

• Most people infected with HIV carry the virus for years before manifesting AIDS. During that period, infected people will have few, if any, symptoms yet they can transmit the virus.

• The percentage of women with AIDS has increased steadily, and the percentage of people infected heterosexually has also increased, surpassing the percentage infected through injecting drug use.

• During 2001, there were 35575 newly diagnosed cases of HIV infection. The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates now that 40,000 new cases of HIV transmission occur every year.

• Of the people infected with the virus of AIDS in the USA in the year 2001, 42% were whites, 37% blacks, 20%  Hispanics and <1% Asians and Pacific Islanders and <1% American Indians and Alaska Natives.

• During the 1990s, the HIV epidemic shifted steadily toward a growing proportion of AIDS cases in blacks and Hispanics and in women.

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is the cause of AIDS (Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome). The presence of  HIV in the body can be detected in several ways. The most common is the HIV-ELISA Antibodies test.

The HIV-ELISA  looks for the body response to the virus manifested by the presence in your blood of Antibodies to HIV proteins. Antibodies are special proteins that our Immune System produce in response to the presence of HIV.

The test performed on your sample actually consists of two tests: a Screening test and a Confirmatory test. The screening test procedure is called an ELISA—Enzyme Linked Immuno-Sorbent Assay or an EIA (Enzyme Immunosorbent Assay). The confirmatory test is used in the event your HIV-ELISA is positive and/or equivocal and is the procedure used is the Western Blot Assay (WB)

The screening and confirmatory tests are usually done using small samples of blood. If a sample of blood tests positive repeatedly in the screening test, it will be confirmed through the Western Blot test. People will be informed that they are infected with HIV only after both the screening and confirmatory tests have shown a positive (reactive) result.

Positive HIV antibody tests results are over 99% accurate when confirmed. Negative HIV antibody tests are over 99% accurate if it has been at least six months after a contact with a potentially HIV-infected partner. False negatives or false positives occur rarely.

Antibodies to HIV can be detected in the blood, in the  urine or in the saliva. People produce antibodies with different speeds and therefore the time interval between infection and the development of antibodies to HIV can go from four weeks to six months from the exposure date or SDC ( Suspected Date of  Contact). The appearance of antibodies in a blood or urine sample of a person which was known to be negative to HIV is called Seroconversion.

The HIV Elisa results are usually available in one or two business days.

THE WINDOW PERIOD

The time period between a person’s contact with the virus (infection) and when HIV antibodies become detectable in blood or other fluids is called the "window period". Most people will develop antibodies detectable within 4-6 weeks after infection with HIV. Some people may take longer; but nearly all (99%) will have antibodies by 6 months following infection. Therefore, the test may not be accurate if a person gets tested too soon after a potential exposure.  People waiting six months from the time of the exposure before testing will have a 99% accurate test result. Until now there have been no studies showing antibodies present  in people with longer than six months exposure to HIV.