Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Doctors Propose Universal HIV Tests

Nature reports that doctors are proposing for universal tests for HIV to try and eliminate the disease. The presumption in this is that once you find out your infected, you won't then infect someone else. But what if ignorance of your own infective status makes you more willing to have protected intercourse, but learning that your infected means you now have nothing left to lose. So what if learning your infected, because you prefer unprotected sex, means now you're more likely to commit sexual fraud and pretend you're not infected when you really are so that you can have unprotected sex with people. It's not like we don't have evidence of HIV+ men purposefully infecting other HIV- people. Testing is one of those areas in the economics of health that is theoretically ambiguous. If people are having protected sex to protect themselves, rather than others, then learning your own infection status may or may not cause you to become safer. It may perversely just cause you to be more reckless, since risky behavior is only risky if there is some chance something bad will happen to you. But if that bad thing has already happened, then you only curb your behavior if you're altruistic. So how altruistic do we think people are? Or rather, how altruistic do they have to be for this to program to be efficient?

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