Approval and Potential Use of Over-the-Counter HIV Self-Tests: The Opinion of Participants in a Street Based HIV Rapid Testing Program in Spain

Abstract

HIV self-testing, not yet available in Spain, is a strategy thought to be able to increase the number of people tested and testing frequency. 3,373 attenders of a street-based HIV rapid-testing program gave their opinion on authorizing over-the-counter self-tests and a potentially shorter lead time if self-tests were available. 88.0 % of participants were in favor of authorization, 9.2 % had no clear opinion and 2.8 % were against. 54.6 % of men who have sex with men (MSM), 38.4 % of men who have sex with women and 36.3 % of women acknowledged a potential for lead time reduction. Potential lead time was associated with being ≥35 years, having a university degree, never injected drugs, previous HIV tests and being concerned about an HIV positive result, and in MSM, also having ≥5 partners. Self-testing seems a promising strategy for Spain: its authorization is supported by nearly all potential users and almost three quarters of MSM would have opted to advance their current testing if self-tests were available.

HIV testing strategies outside of health care settings in the European Union (EU)/European Economic Area (EEA): a systematic review to inform European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control guidance

“…An overview of these 80 studies can be found in Table . Studies were from 14 of the 30 countries in the EU/EEA, with most set in Northern Europe ( n = 37), followed by Southern Europe ( n = 27) and Western Europe ( n = 12).…”

“…The feasibility/acceptability of testing outside of health care settings was assessed by 48 studies (Table ) . Overall, HIV testing was found to be acceptable to people offered testing across community (65–99%) and outreach settings (90–100%) .…”

“…The feasibility/acceptability of testing outside of health care settings was assessed by 48 studies (Table 3) [18,[20][21][22][23][24][27][28][29][31][32][33][34]36,37,40,[42][43][44][46][47][48]51,54,59,61,63,65,67,69,[71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83]85,87,90,93,97]. Overall, HIV testing was found to be acceptable to people offered testing across community (65-99%) [27,…”

“…Selftesting was also considered highly acceptable (71-98%) [23,28,31,42,97] and easy to do (92-98%) [23,42,75,97] and the results easy to interpret (97-99%), [23,28,31,75] although there was evidence to suggest that acceptability may be dependent on test price and location. [79,80,82] Both self-sampling and self-testing reached a high proportion of people who had never previously tested for HIV (10-51%) [18,24,42,43,47,72,79,97]. Perceived benefits of HIV self-testing included privacy, convenience and immediacy [93].…”

Benefits and Potential Harms of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Self-Testing Among Men Who Have Sex With Men in China: An Implementation Perspective

“…Unlike conventional facility-based testing, self-testing procedures can be carried out privately and conveniently at the user’s discretion. This may help facilitate HIV testing among hard-to-reach key populations such as men who have sex with men (MSM), particularly certain subsets with higher sexual risks (4, 5). …”