Young Americans have low rates of HIV testing, despite a 2006 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendation that all Americans 13 to 64 years old receive screening for the virus, Medscape reports. Publishing their findings in the journal Pediatrics, researchers analyzed National Youth Risk Behavior Survey and Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System data among high schoolers and young adults ages 18 to 24.

About 26 percent of new HIV cases in the United States occur among people between 13 and 24 years old. An estimated 25,000 young people in the country have HIV but don’t know it.
 
Twenty-two percent of the high schoolers who had ever had intercourse said they had been tested for HIV, including 17 percent of boys and 27 percent of girls. Thirty-three percent of young adults who had had sex had been tested. Among high schoolers, testing rates did not change overall or for any subgroup between 2005 and 2013. Among the young adults, testing rates dropped between 2011 and 2013 among females overall (from 42 percent to 40 percent), young adult white females (37 percent to 34 percent), and young adult black females (from 69 percent to 60 percent).

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