From this week’s edition of Window on The Week:
The Centers for Disease Control recommended in a September 22 report that all people aged 13–64 be routinely tested for HIV. The CDC is not recommending that tests be mandatory: Patients would be notified and have the option of refusing. Fears such as those aired by the ACLU — that the tests will, in practice, not be voluntary because written consent is not required — are pure paranoia. Previously, doctors had been advised to offer the test only to patients at high risk of being infected. The new recommendation suggests that these people tended not to take the test, and the statistics corroborate this implication: Forty percent of those diagnosed with HIV were tested because they were suffering from its symptoms, meaning they’d already had the virus, on average, for ten years. If more people at risk of getting AIDS were responsible enough to have themselves tested, these revised recommendations would not have been necessary.
More here .