When “citizen journalists” get HIV reporting wrong #HIV #AIDS

I’ve never been shy about preaching that:

a.  ”citizen journalists” are only half right: they’re citizens.

b.  bloggers who want the fame and fortune that goes with running a popular site need to step up to a set of responsibility and ethics that’s sorely lacking from pretty much every site out there.  Not all the big box sites, mind you.  Just most of them.

c.  the amount of HIV/AIDS reporting done by those in the gay community running popular sites is embarrassingly low.  And yesterday it’s also wrong.

JoeMyGod, who never met a copy/paste function he didn’t love (because he’s never written a long form article at all that I’m aware of) ran the below article on how the oral HIV test is just as effective as other methods, than proceeds to copy/paste a quote from the same article to support that:

A mouth swab for HIV has been foundjust as effective as a traditional blood screening.

Researchers from McGill University in Montreal said that their saliva HIV test OraQuick HIV 1/2 was 99 percent accurate for HIV in high-risk populations and about 97 percent in low-risk populations. The oral test works by detecting whether HIV antibodies are present in a person’s oral fluid and gives a result within 20 minutes. “Testing is the cornerstone of prevention, treatment and care strategies,” study leader Dr. Nitika Pant Pai said. “Although previous studies have shown that the oral fluid-based OraQuick HIV 1/2 test has great promise, ours is the first to evaluate its potential at a global level.”

One researcher noted: “A confidential testing option such as self-testing could bring an end to the stigmatization associated with HIV testing.” Some mental health experts have long advised against home HIV testing because of the danger of self-harm upon a positive result. That possibility, however, must be weighed against the greater good of widely expanded status knowledge

Going one better, Instinct Magazine, who’s never met an article they didn’t poach from other sites (generally JMG and Towleroad) ran the same piece, with a couple of tweaks:

Canadian researchers have found that a saliva test yields HIV results as accurately as blood screening. Details follow.

Reports Fox News:

Researchers from McGill University in Montreal said that their saliva HIV test OraQuick HIV 1/2 was 99 percent accurate for HIV in high-risk populations and about 97 percent in low-risk populations.

The oral test works by detecting whether HIV antibodies are present in a person’s oral fluid and gives a result within 20 minutes.

“Testing is the cornerstone of prevention, treatment and care strategies,” Dr. Nitika Pant Pai, lead researcher on the study, said. “Although previous studies have shown that the oral fluid-based OraQuick HIV 1/2 test has great promise, ours is the first to evaluate its potential at a global level.”

“Getting people to show up for HIV testing at public clinics has been difficult because of visibility, stigma, lack of privacy and discrimination,” Pai added. “A confidential testing option such as self-testing could bring an end to the stigmatization associated with HIV testing.”

The implications of the study are powerful as a mouth swab could lay the foundation for home HIV testing kits down the line. Considering the thorough emotional support today’s modern clinics have on hand for upset visitors, how do you feel about the possibility that self-HIV-testing could become a reality?

The problem with both these pieces is that neither one bothered to investigate all the facts to find out they’re actually wrong.  Considering that their “reporting” of information could be playing with someone’s life who believed this on it’s face, they’re both dead wrong.

From AIDSMap, published the very same day: (bolding mine)

The performance of OraQuick, a widely used rapid point-of-care test for HIV diagnosis, is slightly poorer when testing oral fluid samples than when testing blood samples, according to a meta-analysis, published in the online edition of Lancet Infectious Diseases this week.The authors also found that if the test is used in low prevalence settings with oral fluid samples, over one in ten reactive results may turn out to be false-positives.

Rapid diagnostic tests, which can be operated at the point-of-care by doctors or nurses, have a number of attractive features in comparison with conventional laboratory tests. Such devices are essential in resource-limited settings where laboratories are inaccessible or unavailable. As patients do not need to come back for their results on another day, far more people receive their results.

Rapid tests also have the advantage of not requiring a blood sample taken with a needle. Most require a tiny sample of whole blood, taken by pricking a fingertip with the sharp point of a lancet. Some tests can be used with oral fluid, obtained by swabbing an absorbent pad around the outer gums, adjacent to the teeth.

The OraQuick Advance Rapid HIV-1/2 is, by far, the most widely used test which can test oral fluid samples. It is also one of the rapid tests which has been most extensively evaluated by independent researchers. Whilst accuracy has generally been reported to be very good, a few reports have identified problems including false positive results and limited sensitivity in people with recent infection. Such problems seem to have been associated in part with the use of oral fluid samples.

Had either JMG or Instinct bothered to hit Google for corroboration of the Fox news piece (a network that Joe has slammed on many occasions, and rightly so), they’d have found out they were regurgitating bad information.

Nice job.  And by that I mean, not.

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