For a long time doctors were subject to contradictory imperatives with regard to AIDS. On the one hand they were enjoined to treat it as they would treat any other disease, without animadversion on the way in which the patient had caught it; on the other hand they had, before testing for the presence of HIV, to seek special permission of the patient and to ensure that he or she had had counselling before the test was taken – quite unlike the testing for any other disease, syphilis for example. So AIDS was at the same time a disease like any other and also in a completely different category from all other diseases.

It cannot be said that pre-test counseling is universally popular among patients. There was an Australian clinic that famously offered the test with “guaranteed no counseling” and it did not lack for clients. For quite a number of years, however, HIV-test counselling has provided a living for the kind of people who like to hover around the edges of human catastrophe.

However, the recommendation by the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), reported in an article in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, that henceforth the screening of adults for HIV infection should be routine will, if adopted, put paid to all such pre-test counseling. One cannot counsel scores or hundreds of millions of people.

Seven years ago the USPSTF came to a different conclusion on the question of screening for HIV, believing that the benefits were insufficient to recommend it. Since then, however, evidence has accumulated that treating people early in the course of their infection not only prolongs their life but reduces spread of the infection.