Testing, counseling, referral

A mixed‐method nested study among adolescents and young adults (AYA) in rural Lesotho, measuring the effect of home‐based secondary distribution of oral HIV self‐tests (HIVST) on coverage, as well as exploring how AYA perceive this HIV self‐testing model.

A comparison of the outcomes of index client tracing with other community-based HIV counselling and testing program recruitment modalities (mobile, workplace, home-based) in South Africa.

Evidence review reveals what HIV self-testers, potential testers, policy-makers and healthcare providers in Eastern and Southern Africa think of the new testing technology.

Men who have sex with men in Africa are more likely to test for HIV than other African men, but are significantly less likely to be on treatment or virally suppressed.

To achieve epidemic control of HIV by 2030, countries aim to meet 90‐90‐90 targets to increase knowledge of HIV‐positive status, initiation of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and viral suppression by 2020. This study assessed the progress towards these targets from 2014 to 2016 in South Africa as expanded treatment policies were introduced using population‐representative surveys. It concludes that achieving the first 90 target will require targeted and improved testing models for men.

To successfully link to care, persons living with HIV must negotiate a complex series of processes from HIV diagnosis through initial engagement with HIV care systems and providers. Despite the complexity involved, linkage to care is often oversimplified and portrayed as a single referral step. In this article, we offer a new conceptual framework for linkage to care, tailored to the current universal test and treat era that presents linkage to care as its own nuanced pathway within the larger HIV care cascade. Conceptualizing linkage to care in this way may help better identify and specify processes posing a barrier to linkage, and allow for the development of targeted implementation and behavioral science-based approaches to address them. Such approaches are likely to be most relevant to programmatic and clinical settings with limited resources and high HIV burden.

As prevalence of undiagnosed HIV declines, it is unclear whether testing programmes will be cost-effective. To guide their HIV testing programmes, countries require appropriate metrics that can be measured. The cost-per-diagnosis is potentially a useful metric.