Providing pregnant and postpartum women in sub-Saharan Africa with multiple HIV self-tests can make it more likely their male partners will be tested for HIV compared to a standard approach of distributing invitation cards for clinic-based testing, according to a randomized trial published in PLOS Medicine of the University of North Carolina at USA. Low use of testing services in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly by men, is one of the key barriers to meeting targets that UN AIDS has set for HIV prevention. Moreover, efforts to encourage pregnant women and postpartum women to refer their partners for testing and to test as a couple, in order to help prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV, have had limited success.
Between June and October 2015, Indian researchers enrolled in their study 600 women seeking pregnancy and postpartum care at three facilities in Kisumu County, Kenya. All…
