Minority AIDS activists meeting in Hollywood praised federal health officials Friday for urging routine HIV tests for everyone ages 13 to 64 but said the government failed to back up the move with more money for prevention and treatment.

"Testing without treatment is amoral," Phill Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute, told an audience at the United States Conference on AIDS, taking place through Monday in Hollywood.

"What good does it do to tell people they have HIV if we can't treat them?" Wilson said. "If we don't spend the money to prevent them from getting HIV, when they test positive, we have failed them."

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Thursday that HIV tests be made a routine part of medical checkups that would be done unless the person explicitly refused it.

The effort aims to target an ongoing problem in which an estimated one in four Americans infected with the virus -- about 250,000 people -- do not know they are HIV-positive, delaying them from starting drug therapy and raising the risk they will spread the virus.

AIDS advocates at the conference said the CDC took a step forward by calling for routine testing because African-Americans and Latinos are less likely than others to know their HIV status. Testing campaigns, including in Florida, have identified thousands of HIV cases.

But activists also said President Bush and Congress have cut money for education campaigns that teach youth and adults how to prevent the virus through safe sex and abstinence and are not boosting funds to treat additional cases of HIV that the widespread testing will find.

Federal grants to cities and states for HIV treatment and services have been kept flat at $2.1 billion a year for the past four years despite about 40,000 new cases of HIV each year.

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