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Legal Status of EPT - Introduction Assuring treatment of the sex partners of persons with sexually transmitted diseases (STD) has been a central component of prevention and control of bacterial STDs in the United States for decades. Traditional practices to inform, evaluate and treat sex partners of persons infected with STDs have relied upon patients or health care providers to notify partners of infected persons of their exposure to an STD. Initially developed to help control syphilis, partner management became widely recommended for gonorrhea, chlamydial infection and, most recently, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. However, for STDs other than syphilis, partner management based on provider referral is rarely assured, while patient referral has had only modest success in assuring partner treatment. An alternative approach to assuring treatment of partners is expedited partner
therapy (EPT). EPT is the delivery of medications or prescriptions by persons
infected with an STD to their sex
partners without clinical assessment of the partners. Clinicians (e.g., physicians,
nurse practitioners, physician assistants, pharmacists, public health workers)
provide patients with sufficient medications directly or via prescription for
the patients and their partners. After evaluating multiple studies involving
EPT, CDC concluded
that EPT is a “useful option” to further partner
treatment, particularly for male partners of women with chlamydia or gonorrhea Throughout discussions of EPT, the legal status of the practice remained an area of uncertainty. To assist state and local STD programs in their efforts to implement EPT as an additional partner services tool, CDC collaborated with the Center for Law and the Public’s Health at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities to assess the legal framework concerning EPT across all 50 states and other jurisdictions (the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico). The primary research objective was to conceptualize, frame, and identify legal provisions that implicate a clinician’s ability to provide a prescription for a patient’s sex partner, without prior evaluation of that partner, for purposes of treating an STD (specifically chlamydia or gonorrhea). The results of this research, with explanatory information for six key areas of inquiry and summary conclusions for each state are presented here. Please note that, with the exception of the District of Columbia, research about local statutes was not undertaken; the unit of study was the state or territory. Page last modified: August 16, 2007 Page last reviewed: December 20, 2007 Content Source: Division of STD Prevention, National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention |
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