HIV/AIDS Named Reporting - Good or Bad?

Proponents of named reporting say that it is the only effective means of tracking the spread of HIV and AIDS. In addition, named reporting assists officials with partner notification, an important part of AIDS prevention. AIDS diagnoses have been tracked by name for years but because of medicinal advances fewer people are being diagnosed with AIDS. Therefore, tracking only AIDS diagnoses does not give an accurate picture of the extent of the epidemic. For this reason, government officials feel tracking HIV infections by name is essential in accurately determining the severity of the outbreak and effectively slowing its spread.Opponents of named reporting have serious concerns regarding patient confidentiality. They advocate reporting HIV and AIDS diagnoses using a unique identifier system which would assign randomly chosen numbers and letters to a person's test results. With this method, the surveillance groups would get the information they require, while maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of persons diagnosed with HIV and AIDS.

In addition, many advocacy groups feel named reporting would be a deterrent to testing. People, fearing repercussions of an HIV test or a positive result, would choose not to be tested. One study found that 68% of people polled would not be willing to get tested if reporting of results was done by name (Woods, et.al. 1998). This reluctance would result in even more infections, transmitted by people who had no idea they were infected. Some experts estimate that of the 700,000 HIV-positive Americans, as many as 300,000 may not know they are infected (AIDS Action, 1998).

The split over named reporting will not be solved easily or quickly. With several groups jumping on the named reporting bandwagon, AIDS Advocacy groups seemed to be less united than ever before. With impending laws that appear to make AIDS transmission a crime, the gap between named and anonymous testing will only widen. Currently, two states, California and New York, are coming close to passing laws which require named reporting and re-reporting when medical care is sought. The advocacy groups see this as a deterrent not only to testing but also to seeking early treatment, thus widening the gap further. Jeffery Reynolds, policy director of the Long Island Association for AIDS Care best sums up the battle over reporting. "We’ve gotten so caught up in medical advances, we’ve kind of lost the focus that HIV is far more than a medical issue." (Fuentes, 1999).