Take the time: Health and Wellness Center offers students free HIV testing

Roberta McShane conducts an HIV/AIDS test at the New Era Barber and Beauty in Arlington on May 8, 2008. McShane and Rev. John Reed work at the AIDS Outreach Center in Fort Worth. They visit various locations in the Metroplex to test for HIV/AIDS. (Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Amy Peterson)

One in five Americans are unaware they have Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

The Boise State Health and Wellness Center wants to change how the sexually transmitted virus affects BSU students by offering a free HIV test in a new lab in the Norco building behind the Boise State Recreational Center. The disease is a concern nationally — Boiseans should not ignore the danger.

More than 7,000 people worldwide contract HIV every day. That’s 2.7 million newly infected people every year, with the United States contributing 56,000 annual new cases, according to the CDC.

Andrew Wingfield, a senior majoring in psychology with an addiction studies minor, works at the clinic where students can get tested with a painless swab of saliva and have results in 20 minutes. He administers the test and helps promote HIV awareness on campus along with Jodi Brawley, health educator at the Health and Wellness Center.

The test is administered by swabbing the inside of the upper and lower lip, then mixing it with a buffer solution. “Kind of like a pregnancy test,” Wingfield said, with a chuckle. Within 20 minutes the test will give a preliminary result which is accurate within 99 percent, according to Wingfield. If the preliminary result is positive, then an HIV blood test must be administered to confirm. The Health and Wellness Center offers emotional counseling for those who receive a positive preliminary result, as well as medical options and referrals to organizations such as Allied Links for the Prevention of HIV and AIDS (ALPHA), if needed.

“I had worked previously for Jodi as a peer educator doing sexual health and reproductive health and found that one of my passions was specifically HIV and AIDS because it’s one of the areas I feel is most stigmatized when it comes to STIs (sexually transmitted infections),” Wingfield said. ”There’s a lot of people out there that still believe it’s confined to the LGTB (lesbian, gay, transsexual and bisexual) community and they can’t get it as long as they’re having heterosexual sex. But in this day and age … people need to be keeping themselves safer.”

HIV can be transmitted through any kind of unprotected sexual intercourse, whether it be heterosexual or homosexual. Condoms have not been proven to prevent the transmission of  HIV between partners. The only proven way to prevent spreading the infection is abstinence, the CDC said.

The program is funded by the BSU Foundation, which receives its funding from the Idaho AIDS Network.

Brawley, who directly oversees the functionality of the free HIV testing clinic, said there has been a program like it before but students had to pay.

“We used to do it through Medical Services, and they still do the blood tests upstairs (second floor of the Norco building),” Brawley said.

Although the program offering free HIV tests has been running since the fall semester began, as of Thursday, only three students have come in for a test. The clinic is very discreet, even going so far as to have a radio blaring white noise in certain areas to prevent eavesdropping.

Brawley also addressed some common misconceptions about HIV.

“One of them is that it’s a death sentence. People think that if you get HIV, you’re going to die, but that’s not the case.”

“Early detection is the key,” Wingfield said.

FACTBOX:

Get your test and be sure once and for all

*When: Mondays and Thursdays

*Time: 2 to 5 p.m.

*Where: University Health Services, Norco Building

*Cost: Free for students

*When does it end: It’s available as long as school is in session.

*No registration necessary. Walk-ins are welcome.

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Posted by Rebecca De León on Sep 7 2010. Filed under Culture, Main Feature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.