An interesting article by Ciancio et al. (2025) One who examines the effect of learning has HIV when no treatment is available.
When no treatment is available for life-drank disease, providing personal health information can cause disappointment or fatal behavior resulting in negative health results. We use an experiment in Malawi to document the possibility that random incentives to learn HIV testing results in a context where antiretroviral treatment was not yet available. Six years after the experiment, among the HIV positive individuals, who learned their positions, they were 23 percent less, which were less likely to survive than those who were not with the effects that maintained 15 years later. Receiving an HIV positive diagnosis resulted in risky health behavior, more anxiety and high discount rates.
An important question to ask is whether the value of transparency and the ‘right to detect the patient’ should not proceed with negative health effects from patient knowledge of potentially untreated disease. The entire study is here.
