Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Maximizing The Delivery Performance Of Point-Of-Care Cd4+ T-Cell Counting Tests In Resource-Limited Settings - A Policy Brief, Nan Kong, J. Paul Robinson, Fenggang Yang

Purdue Policy Research Institute (PPRI) Policy Briefs

Managing HIV/AIDS presents challenges to public health policymakers, frontline workers, and researchers worldwide. A key strategy in the disease management is early diagnosis and rapid treatment initiation. While the technological field of point‐of‐care HIV/AIDS diagnostics has advanced significantly in the past two decades, several critical issues remain that hinder the deployment of point‐of‐care testing devices in resource‐deprived settings. In this policy brief, we discuss these issues, including technological specifics of point‐of‐care CD4⁺ T‐cell counting approaches and requirements of deploying them. We also discuss cultural and religious concerns on the deployment. At the end of the brief, we propose a …