Texts Doubles HIV Testing
posted: 08/04/2011
Twice as many gay men tested for HIV again, when they were sent text (SMS) reminders, than men who were not texted a reminder to come back for another HIV / STI test.
Gay men in Australia are advised to have an HIV test once a year – like gay men in the UK. And men with riskier sex lives are advised to test every 3 or 6 months.
Increasing the proportion of men who know their HIV status through testing regularly helps cut the number of new infections. The problem in Australia (and it is not much different in the UK) is that only a quarter of gay men taking more sex risks do take more than one HIV test a year.
So a clinic in central Sydney tried sending text (SMS) reminders to see if this helped get the men in for testing more often. 714 HIV-negative gay men who had an HIV test and sexual health screen between January and August 2009 were sent a text to remind them to come for another HIV/STI check, every four months.
They compared these 714 HIV negative men with two other groups. 1084 other men who had had a HIV test got no text reminders. Another comparison was made with 1753 men who tested at the Sydney clinic in 2008 before they tried sending anyone text reminders.
Re-testing doubled returning for testing
The answer was texting more than doubled the rate of returns for testing within the year - 64% of the men who had a text reminder came back, compared with 30% of those who didn’t and 31% of those from before texting started to be tried.
Really it was 4 times better
After taking into account some differences in the study groups, the clinic found the text reminders meant there was in fact a four-fold increase in the chances of re-testing (using an odds ratio statistical analysis).
Texts are an easy win for clinics
They comment that text reminders are an easy win for the clinic because they “allowed large numbers of messages to be sent simultaneously and automatically, reminders were direct, immediate and cheap to send and demanded minimal labour.” If morwe clinics used text reminders this has “great potential to reduce HIV/STI infection rates” among gay and bi men.
Frequent testing means people who do get HIV will have better health
Another study, this one from the Netherlands, shows that frequent testing (at least once a year) means people who do get HIV have better prospects for good health and life with HIV. “Our findings illustrate the benefit of repeated testing for HIV,” write the investigators, “it shortens the time between infection and diagnosis and improves the likelihood of timely treatment, with the prevention of clinical progression to AIDS and death.”
The Dutch researchers also believe that “increasing testing to annually may greatly impact on transmission rates at a population level.” They quote a modelling study that suggests transmission rates in the Netherlands could fall by 40% over ten years “if the average time between infection and diagnosis was reduced to 1 year.”
Source for Austrailian texting with reference
Source for Dutch annual testing, better health if you do get HIV with reference
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