The largest global HIV self-testing study takes off

Delegates at the just concluded 21st International AIDS Conference 2016 heard that there is a strong demand for HIV self-testing kit in rural areas of Africa according to a study done in Zimbabwe.

The largest global HIV Self-Testing Africa (STAR) research project also studied whether the same self-testing kit would help male partners of women undergoing antenatal services to test and whether such a procedure would sometimes be coercive.

HIV self-testing has been proposed as an additional approach to help countries expand access to HIV testing services.  World Health Organization (WHO) defines HIV self-testing as a process in which a person, who wants to know his or her HIV status, collects a specimen, performs a test and interprets his or her test result, often in private.

There are many models for implementing HIV self-testing, which vary in the level of support provided and how and where HIV self-testing kits are distributed. Approaches include support from health workers, distribution or sale in the community or a health facility, as well as sale in pharmacies, kiosks, vending machines and through the Internet.

The conference heard that the four year STAR project aims to generate evidence from the study communities on the acceptability, feasibility, scalability, costs and cost-effectiveness of the various methods.

The first phase of the study is from 2015 - 2017 and over 730,000 self-testing kits will have been distributed across Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi. The second phase which will be from 2017 - 2019 will be done in South Africa and will provide more two million self-testing kits.

"Community-based distribution of HIV Self-testing is acceptable and results in high testing coverage, particularly among men and young people. The high testing yield suggests participation by high risk individuals with unknown status, although we cannot exclude use of kits to confirm known HIV+ve status. More precise estimates of uptake and linkage based on household surveys are currently being analyzed," Euphemia Lindelwe Sibanda of the Centre for Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS Research, Harare, Zimbabwe, said while presenting at the conference.