Seroprevalence of HIV infection among the patients attending various emergency departments in a tertiary care hospital

Abstract

Emergency departments (EDs) receive patients from every background, socioeconomic group and health status. Hence, EDs can play a critical role in offering human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) testing and help in the national strategy of early HIV detection. The present study was conducted on 400 patients attending various EDs after taking Institutional Review Board approval. They were screened for HIV antibodies by three rapid/simple assay tests having different principles/antigens as per the NACO guidelines. Twenty-three (5.75%) of the 400 patients were HIV reactive. Fifteen (65.22%) of the 23 HIV-reactive patients were unaware of their reactive status. Majority of the HIV-reactive (65.22%) patients were from the Medicine emergency followed by Orthopaedics and Surgery (13.04%). Seven (30.43%) had history of fever of more than 1 month duration. Eight (34.78%) of them were later on clinically diagnosed as having various opportunistic infections. Thus, the study emphasizes the need for expansion of routine voluntary HIV counseling and testing to all the patients who come to the ED and practicing universal work precautions by health care workers.

Keywords: Emergency department; human immunodeficiency virus; rapid test; universal work precautions.