When STI’s and HPV remain untreated in women, they can lead to long term problems such as cervical cancer, pelvic inflammatory disease, and infertility. Diagnosing and treating these illnesses before they lead to long term problems in the population remains a concern for the government. What if there was a test to administer from the comfort of people’s homes that would alleviate some of the inconvenience and perhaps embarrassment of going to an STI clinic or your General Practitioner (GP) for this test after a new encounter? Would people be willing to pay for the opportunity to
diagnose themselves?
This August, CBC news Toronto broke the news that a Toronto based company called Eve Medical will begin selling at home test kits for STI’s, such as gonorrhea, chlamydia, and HPV. The test is administered at home, and then lab results are shipped to a lab in Toronto for results. This test costs
less than $100, and marks a notable shift in a bid by private companies to gain more market shares in this area of the medical field.
According to Eve Medical’s site, the kit can be purchased online by female Canadians, where they will collect some personal information in order to set up a personal profile
[1]. Then when the kit arrives, it is easy to use, and does not require the user to draw any blood. After putting the sample back in the pre-prepared envelope that is
shipped to a lab, the user has to simply wait a few days for results to appear online or via a mobile phone.
While the aim of this venture may be capitalistic in nature, this is not the first attempt at controlling the incidence of an STI through experimenting with various delivery methods of testings. A study was published in January 2016 of the international journal of Sexually Transmitted Infections, in which an article entitled “
Describing a complex and changing Landscapes: metrics for understanding and planning chlamydia control” by Sarah C Woodhall and John Saunder in which a study from the Netherlands was carried out over 4 years (2006-2010) of people aged 16 to 29 years in order to determine which testing setting was most utilized among this population.
The internet screening tests for chlamydia were made available to this population through Internet via the
Chlamydia Screening Implementation Project. The results showed that General Practitioner visits and the Internet screening tests each accounted for just less than one third of the tests, and STI clinics and gynecology offices accounted for one fifth.
Another salient find from the study highlighted that of all of the settings, the majority of the diagnoses were made in GP and STI clinics. The questions that studies such as these bring up are whether or not Internet testing could provide public doctors offices with relief, while bringing the privatized sector of the medical institutions profit.
The result of such a shift to paying for privatized health care for STI’s is yet to be discovered, and the demand is yet unknown in an untested market. But Eve Medical promises “
comfort, prevention, and sample quality”, all from the comfort of one’s own home
[2]. They also have plenty of justification for their position, citing links to 48 studies on their website of studies conducted internationally between 2005 to present on the epidemic that STI’s and HPV have become worldwide
[3]. Eve Medical also provides the added assurance that they are backed by
Health Canada and ISO13485 certified. The question still remains at to whether the convenience of bypassing the hospitals and clinics for testing that is more personal in nature be something that will catch on in all provinces in Canada.
