HEALTH
City Health Department Offers Free In-Home HIV Tests
More than 12,000 kits have been distributed citywide since 2015
Dr. Oni Blackstock.
BY MATT TRACY
The city health department
has been giving
away free in-home HIV
test kits in an effort to
reach more communities facing
heightened HIV risk, including
men who have sex with men and
transgender women who have sex
with men.
The department has provided
12,000 test kits through multiple
waves of the initiative, which was
launched in 2015 and remains
active today. The in-home tests,
which consist of oral swabs and
yield results in 20-40 minutes,
are promoted by the city through
a campaign of targeted advertisements
on social media platforms
and dating apps including Grindr,
Scruff, BGCLive, Jack’d, Hornet,
Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
In subsequent waves, the program
was also promoted in Spanish.
Those who view the advertisement
and click on it are directed
to a survey presenting a series of
questions to determine the person’s
eligibility for the in-home test. Individuals
are required to be either
MEDICINE.YALE.EDU
Dr. Oni Blackstock.
men, transgender, or intersex, have
had sex with a man in the last year,
live in New York City, be at least18
years old, and not already have an
HIV diagnosis — though through a
subsequent, separate initiative the
health department is reaching out
more broadly.
“Our Online HIV Self-Test Giveaway
eligibility criteria are based
not only on the fact that these
groups are disproportionately affected
by HIV, but that there is
precedent for successful online
recruitment among these groups,”
said Dr. Oni Blackstock, the assistant
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commissioner for the Bureau
of HIV/ AIDS Prevention and Control
at the city health department.
If the individuals are deemed
eligible, the health department
emails them a discount code that
can be used to obtain a free test
kit from a manufacturer’s website.
If they are not eligible, they are directed
to HIV prevention and care
resource websites. Eligible participants
who receive the code are also
provided with resources regarding
where to find HIV confirmatory
testing, HIV-related care, and PrEP
and PEP services.
In 2017, the department expanded
the program to other communities
through a separate, but
similar Community Home Test
Giveaway initiative in conjunction
with community-based organizations.
The first phase of that program
targeted men who have sex
with men and transgender individuals,
especially people of color, as
well as Black and Latinx women,
sex workers, populations facing
housing insecurity, and those who
reside in neighborhoods experiencing
high rates of poverty.
In the second phase of that program,
the department ditched the
eligibility requirements and made
the tests available to anyone who
engaged with community-based
organizations participating in the
program.
The online program has continued
on its own and the city views it
as a way to reach individuals who
are uninsured or underinsured,
face travel barriers, or otherwise
avoid conventional testing due to
stigma or other factors.
“Sixteen percent of participants
have never been tested before,”
Blackstock said, underscoring the
test’s ability to better reach demographic
groups that other testing
outreach efforts have fallen short.
Blackstock said that the accuracy
of the OraQuick in-home test,
which is the one tied to the city’s
program, is “quite high.” According
to the Food and Drug Administration,
the tests are 92 percent
accurate when the results show a
positive HIV test and 99.98 percent
effective when results are negative.
The risk of a “false positive” makes
the referrals given participants for
confirmatory testing important.
The city and state have each celebrated
gains in their respective
efforts to eradicate the HIV/ AIDS
epidemic locally, but the greatest
progress among gay and bisexual
men has been seen among white
men, and improvements in HIV infection
rates in Black and Latinx
communities have not been as pronounced.
Still, white individuals made up
the largest share of participants
during the first three waves of
the in-home test giveaway. In the
fifth and most recent wave, 35 percent
of participants were Latinx,
32 percent were white, 17 percent
were Black, 11 percent were Asian/
Pacific Islander, and five percent
classified themselves as “Multiple
Races/ Other.”
The vast majority of participants
through the first five waves were
cisgender men, with trans and
gender nonconforming individuals
representing between zero and
five percent of the participants, depending
on the wave.
January 16 - January 2 16 9, 2020 | GayCityNews.com
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