About one in 10 of the more than 7 million people living with HIV in South Africa are not aware that they have the virus. One way to ensure that more people are diagnosed quicker is to make HIV self-testing kits more widely available – particularly to people who may not otherwise opt to have an HIV test done at a facility.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines HIV self-testing as the process whereby an individual collects their own specimen (blood or oral fluid), performs HIV testing using an HIV rapid diagnostic test and interprets the result themselves, either assisted or unassisted.
According to professor Francois Venter, deputy executive director of the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute, and director of Ezintsha – a group of South African academics and health professionals – each test is packaged with a set of easy-to-use instructions which dictate the step-by-step process that needs to be followed to obtain an accurate result.