BACKGROUND
Men who have sex with men (MSM) who undergo HIV voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) usually self-identify as having many sexual partners and as being exposed to risky sexual networks. Limited research discusses the application of motivative interviews and convenience referral platforms for MSM to facilitate the referral of sexual partners to HIV testing. The social network analysis (SNA) of such referral strategy remains unclear.
OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the effects of sexual partners’ referral through the social networking platforms for HIV testing and the test results after having elicited interviews with MSM, compare the different characteristics and risk behaviors of the subgroups, and to explore the unknown sexual affiliations through visualizing and quantifying the social network graph.
METHODS
This is a cohort study design. Purposeful sampling was used to recruit the index subjects at a community HIV screening station that is frequented by MSM in Taipei City on Friday and Saturday nights. Respondent-driven sampling was used to recruit the sexual partners. Partner-elicited interviews were conducted by trained staff before the VCT to motivate MSM to become the referrer to refer sexual partners via the Line application (app) or to disclose the account and profile on the relevant social networking platforms. The rapid HIV test was delivered to the referred sexual partners and the recruitment process continued in succession until leads were exhausted.
RESULTS
After the interviews, 28.2% (75/266) MSM were successfully persuaded to be index subjects in the first wave, referring 127 sexual partners via the Line app for the rapid HIV testing, and disclosing 40 sexual partners. The index subjects and the tested sexual partners exhibited higher numbers of sexual partners (F = 3.83, P = .023), higher frequencies of anal intercourse (F = 10.10, P < .001), and higher percentages of those who had not previously received HIV testing (x2 = 6.106, P = .047) when compared to the subjects without referrals. The newly HIV-seropositivity rate of tested sexual partners was 2.4%, which was higher than the other two groups. The SNA discovered four types of sexual affiliation, namely chain, Y, star, and complicated type. The complicated type had the most HIV-positive nodes. There were 26.87% (43/160) of the HIV-negative sexual partners who had sexual affiliations with HIV-positive nodes; 40% of them (10/25) were untested sexual partners, who had directly sexual affiliation with HIV-positive node. Four transmission bridge was found in the network graph.
CONCLUSIONS
Partner-elicited interviews can effectively promote the referral or disclosure sexual partners via social networking platforms for HIV testing and HIV case finding, and can reveal unknown sexual affiliations of MSM that can facilitate the development of a tailored prevention program.