Editorial Open Access Journal of Tropical Diseases Monitoring HIV Patients with CD4 Point-of-Care (POC) Instruments: Are Those Technologies Good Enough?

Copyright: © 2013 Kestens L. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Antiretroviral treatment roll-out in low-income countries has been relatively successful and covers approximately 25 % of the HIV infected population. The target of UNAIDS is to treat 50 % of all HIV patients by 2015 [1]. The decision to start treatment of HIV patients is based on clinical symptoms and on the degree of immune deficiency which is measured by counting the number of CD4+ T lymphocytes in peripheral blood. According to current treatment guidelines, patients with less than 350 CD4 cells per µl blood are eligible for antiretroviral treatment [2]. In high-income countries, CD4 counting is performed on expensive high-end flow cytometers with high accuracy and precision