The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is calling for doctors
to test most people ages 15 to 64, whether they fall in high-
risk groups or not, for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. I see
only one thing wrong with this proposal: We should have started
doing it years ago. Decades ago. Admittedly, it's in more recent
years that medicine has learned that treatment for HIV is more
successful when it starts earlier rather than later. But long
before we had any effective treatments for HIV infection, it was
clear that if people knew they had AIDS, they could and usually
would take steps to avoid infecting others, through safer-sex
measures and the like. For a long time, society's distaste for
the factors most commonly associated with infection -- sex among
gay males, sex with multiple partners and intravenous drug use
-- kept people from seeking out testing, fearing they would be
seen as immoral. Doctors didn't dare even suggest it in many
cases. Time to get over that. According to the U.S. Centers for
Disease Contr