This debate has simmered for years. The guidelines are expected to be supportive of name-based HIV surveillance. Time for 'out of the box' thinking My beef with our community is how unwilling some folks have been to think out of the box and examine if our traditional opposition to name-based surveillance makes sense in 1998. For individual states to arrive at a workable HIV surveillance systems, it's necessary to examine all of the relevant data. Much of these data have been released in the last few months, and some members of our community either ignore or misstate them.
Anonymous testing is available in all other states.
The CDC strongly supports the option of anonymous testing. In fact, unless state laws prohibit it, the CDC requires states receiving prevention funding to offer anonymous testing. Over 55 percent of people surveyed in each state did not know if infected people were reported to the health department. Only 2 percent cited it as the main reason. There was no indication this was the case among a sample of 399 people studied.