Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2010 Jan;31(1):27-9.
doi: 10.4103/0253-7184.68997.

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

Pushpa Devi  1 , Usha Arora, Shalini Yadav, Sita Malhotra
Affiliations

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

Pushpa Devi et al. Indian J Sex Transm Dis AIDS. 2010 Jan.

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.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest: None declared

References

    1. A novel emergency department based prevention intervention program for people living with HIV: evaluation of early experiences. Available from: http://www.biomedicentral.com/1472-6963/164[last cited on 2008 Jun 6] - PMC - PubMed
    1. Teja VD, Sudha T, Lakshmi V. Emergency department based HIV screening: An opportunity for early diagnosis in high prevalent areas. Indian J Med Microbiol. 2008;26:167–71. - PubMed
    1. Kizer KW. HIV disease and emergency medicine. West J Med. 1989;151:65–6. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. Recommendations for Human Immunodeficiency Virus Testing services for in-patients, in Acute Care Hospital settings-Recommendations and Reports. MMWR. 1993:42. (RR-02)
    1. Glick NR, Silva A, Zun L, Whitman S. HIV testing in a resource -poor urban emergency department. AIDS Educ Prev. 2004;16:126–36. - PubMed