Dutch patient still dies of AIDS after HIV diagnosis too late

A Dutch study found that 22 people died and 365 were hospitalized with AIDS in the last five years in the Netherlands. pointer. All of these patients were diagnosed with HIV when their immune systems were already severely affected or even after contracting AIDS. Doctors in the Netherlands are not doing enough HIV testing, health care providers told Pointer.

HIV is highly treatable if diagnosed at the right time. However, delayed diagnosis is very dangerous. Viruses affect the immune system, making patients more susceptible to viral and bacterial infections. In the early stages, more cold and flu-like symptoms appear. Ultimately, patients may contract tuberculosis or cancer.

According to Poynter, figures from Stichting HIV Monitoring showed that 57% of people diagnosed with HIV between 2017 and 2021 were diagnosed late. This concerns a total of 1,314 people.

OLVG Amsterdam physician Keith Brinkmann regularly treats patients with advanced HIV infection. “There are people in my office who have severe pneumonia, brain abscesses and various cancers. Most of these patients have already reached the stage of AIDS,” he said on the show. . Brinkman said most of the patients had previously experienced symptoms and sought medical attention, but had not been tested for HIV.

“These are all victims that could have been prevented if treatment had been started in time,” Casper Rocks, a physician and infectious disease specialist at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, told Pointer.

According to Saskia Bogarth, a research doctor at the University of Amsterdam Medical Center, the problem remains the stigma surrounding HIV. Healthcare workers have a hard time talking about it. Because HIV is relatively rare, doctors don’t recognize symptoms. And we still have limited ideas about who gets the virus. “Many health professionals only think about gay men who have a lot of sexual contact.

Brinkman hopes that HIV testing, complete with a checklist of common symptoms of the virus, will become standard procedure. “If doctors consulted the list more often, HIV infection could be detected more quickly. Only then can late diagnosis be eliminated in the Netherlands.”