Expanded HIV testing guidelines

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 53, No. 1, January February 2011, Page 49 News

Vancouver Coastal Health, Providence Health Care, and the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS have announced an expansion of HIV testing guidelines as part of the STOP HIV/AIDS pilot project.

Under the new guidelines, health care providers are encouraged to routinely offer an HIV test to individuals who meet any of the following criteria:

• Anyone who presents to acute or community care who has ever been sexually active and has not had an HIV test in the past year. 
• Individuals with a past history of sexually transmitted infection. 
• Anyone tested for or diagnosed with hepatitis C, any sexually transmitted infection, or tuberculosis.

These additions supplement existing guidelines based on the presence of HIV symptoms and provider awareness of a patient’s HIV risk factors. By moving away from a risk-based ap­proach to testing, the new guidelines will help diagnose infections in individuals outside currently recognized risk groups.

See the article on page 13 of this issue for details.

. Expanded HIV testing guidelines . BCMJ, Vol. 53, No. 1, January, February, 2011, Page(s) 49 - News.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

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