Broader testing for AIDS virus urged

''Given the availability of effective therapy and preventive measures, it is possible to improve care and perhaps influence the course of the epidemic through widespread, effective, and cost-effective screening," Dr. Samuel A. Bozzette wrote in an editorial accompanying the studies, which appear in today's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

A failure to institute such screening at doctors' offices and clinics would be ''a critical disservice" to patients with the AIDS virus and ''the future health of the nation," wrote Bozzette, who is from the University of California at San Diego and the Rand Corp. think tank in Santa Monica, Calif.

Dr. Robert Janssen, director of HIV-AIDS prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the CDC will reevaluate its guidelines over the next two years, and will consider the study's findings as well as the availability of new, rapid HIV tests that produce results in a half-hour instead of the usual week or two.

Who would bear the cost of expanded testing -- and the cost of the treatment, which runs to at least $15,000 a year -- remains a sticky question amid government cutbacks in healthcare funding. However, Janssen said the studies' findings could lead some private insurers to encourage more HIV testing.

One of the studies, by researchers at Duke and Stanford universities and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, estimated that routine one-time testing of everyone would cut new infections each year by more than 20 percent, and that every HIV-infected patient identified would gain an average of 1½ years of life.

The other study, by Yale and Harvard researchers, indicated that testing people every three to five years would be cost-effective for all but the lowest-risk people, such as those who are celibate or are in monogamous heterosexual relationships. And even for those people, one-time testing was found to be cost-effective.