GetaKit

STI testing from GetaKit is now available . Click on the link in our profile to order STI testing today.

Fashionably late to this social media trend 💅, meet the young faces of the GetaKit team.

In the week’s practice of sharing knowledge with community, .ca , and found that using syphilis Point-of-Care Tests are a valuable clinical tool for rapid syphilis diagnosis and treatment, especially in high-prevalence settings. It supports both prompt treatment and antibiotic stewardship, but should be used alongside patient history, physical examination, and conventional serology diagnosis and management. 

“Any Canadian who asks for HIV prevention drugs should get them”.

Dr. Darrell Tan went on CBC on World AIDS Day to discuss the new pan-Canadian HIV PEP and PrEP guidelines.

Check out the full interview here: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/hiv-prevention-drugs-new-canadian-guidelines-9.6999036.

Patrick O’Byrne, the Principal Investigator of .ca, joined and friends in commemorating World AIDS Day.

This morning, Patrick O’Byrne, the Principal Investigator of .ca, joined the in commemorating World AIDS Day on Parliament Hill. Read some of the words he shared here.

Today, December 1, 2025, .ca commemorates World AIDS Day. This year, the theme is ‘Overcoming disruption, transforming the AIDS response.’ According to the , this draws our attention to “the HIV response standing at a crossroads after decades of progress. Life-saving services are being disrupted, and many communities face heightened risks and vulnerabilities. Yet amid these challenges, hope endures in the determination, resilience, and innovation of communities who strive to end AIDS.”

In this week’s practice of sharing knowledge with community, .ca and suggest that HIV self-tests are best positioned, not as diagnostic tools for “finding the undiagnosed,” but as strategic entry points into broader sexual health services, including PrEP initiation.

In this week’s practice of sharing knowledge with community, .ca aim to assess positivity rates for asymptomatic contacts of Neisseria gonorrhoeae (NG) and Chlamydia trachomatis (CT) to inform treatment practices.The analysis included positivity rates, numbers needed to treat (NNT), and correlations with risk factors.

In this week’s practice of sharing knowledge with community, and recommend that prescribing doxy-PEP to gbMSM with at least one (1) bacterial-STI in the past 12 months is the most efficient and sustainable public health strategy. Universal use would lead to overprescription, and waiting for a second infection misses opportunities for prevention. The GetaKit study also emphasizes the importance of proper patient counseling about doxy-PEP’s limitations, ongoing testing, and awareness of symptoms to avoid reliance on the drug as a fail-safe.

In this week’s practice of sharing knowledge with community, and share that results reporting to GetaKit remains under 50% among gbMSM from ACB communities. When this was discussed in a focus group, participants shared that they wished to maintain their privacy and confidentiality, preferring to speak directly to Black-CAP – an AIDS Service Organization in Toronto that serves ACB clients.

These findings suggest that preference for HIV self-testing can be viewed as evidence of community resiliency. However, it is still important to be cautious that widespread distrust of the healthcare system does not manifest as a maladaptive form of resiliency.

In this week’s practice of sharing knowledge with community, share that while self-testing accounted for a small proportion of HIV tests, it had a higher positivity rate which suggests that it is a successful way to link people to testing and treatment. However, the success of the self-test should not be considered as evidence to replace lab-based testing. It is necessary to have a variety of options to improve access to HIV testing so that we can achieve the UNAIDS 95-95-95 goals.