Jul 27, 2007

Sandra Thomas, Vancouver Courier
Published: Friday, July 27, 2007
Visitors to the Vancouver Art Gallery next month can combine their love of Monet and Dali with advanced medical testing.

The tests are part of a national project to bring mobile HIV testing to public spaces. Vancouver-based bioLytical Laboratories will set up a trailer outside the gallery and at Kits Beach Aug. 10 and 11 to offer free HIV tests on the spot.

Patricia Daly, Vancouver's medical health officer, said the tests are reliable, and she believes they'll likely be introduced at city facilities in the near future. She noted the tests are already used at some local clinics.

Daly said while she has confidence in the test, she wants the campaign to follow provincial HIV testing guidelines from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control. "Those guidelines include things like pre-test counselling, that if a test does come back positive that it's sent to my office and that there's follow-up planned," said Daly.

Daly would like testing expanded to areas where people with a greater chance of contracting the virus live and work. "Kits Beach and the art gallery are not necessarily high risk areas," she said. "I'd like to see the test reach people with higher risk factors."

At 60 seconds for a reading, bioLytical's INSTI HIV test is the fastest HIV diagnostic test in the world and is the only test approved by Health Canada for testing in doctor's offices, clinical laboratories and in emergency care. INSTI can detect the presence of antibodies to HIV in whole blood, serum or plasma and, according to clinical trials across Canada, has a 99.96 per cent accuracy rate.

INSTI testing is going on the road as part of the Test Your Commitment Campaign to educate Canadian youth and demonstrate the ease of testing. It's expected thousands of people will be tested for the virus during the campaign, which is a joint project between bioLytical Laboratories and Virgin Mobile Canada. After Vancouver, the mobile testing unit will move to Toronto and Montreal later in August.

BioLytical is donating 5,000 INSTI tests to the campaign and will publish a list of doctors and clinics that offer the test. Money raised during the campaign will be donated to UNICEF Canada's Unite for the Children, Unite Against AIDS campaign about the effect of AIDS and HIV on the world's children.

William Booth, executive director of AIDS Vancouver, supported mobile testing as long as the guidelines from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control are followed. "More than 30 per cent of people in Canada do not know their HIV status," said Booth. "So we think anything that increases awareness is good."

AIDS Vancouver is part of an umbrella organization that meets once a month. Representatives from bioLytical made a presentation about the INSTI HIV test to the umbrella group. "The people who attended the meeting were satisfied with the results," said Booth. "The technology is reliable."

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