In a new joint letter, the leaders of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) encourage the public health and substance use disorder (SUD) treatment communities to increase the number of people with SUD who are tested and treated for HIV and viral hepatitis.

In their message, “Advancing HIV and Viral Hepatitis Testing with Point-of-Care Diagnostics for People with Substance Use Disorder,” Miriam Delphin-Rittmon, PhD, Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use, and Mandy Cohen, MD, MPH, Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, discuss the connection between injection drug use and acquisition of hepatitis C, hepatitis B, and HIV, the prevalence of these diseases among people who inject drugs, and CDC’s recommendations for HIV, HCV, and HBV testing for people who inject drugs. While millions of Americans receive SUD treatment services each year, they observe, only a third of the nation’s 15,000 SUD treatment facilities offer HIV, HCV, or HBV testing. They encourage those facilities to integrate HIV and viral hepatitis testing into the services they offer clients and highlight recent advances in point-of-care diagnostics that support such integration, including FDA-approved POC tests for HIV and the recently FDA-cleared fingerstick POC HCV RNA test that enables same-day diagnosis. Providing these tests in SUD treatment settings can reduce barriers to accessing them and facilitate initiation of treatment.

Read and share the letter.

This blog post was published December 17, 2024, on HIV.gov.