Get Tested Together: Importance of Couple Testing for HIV and STIs

If you are in a relationship in which you and your partner are sexually active, get tested as a couple.

That is the advice of Sade Leon Slinger-Folkes who has over 30 years’ experience as a community health educator with the Ministry of Health.

She said getting tested as a couple was the only way to be sure of a partner’s HIV status or if the individual had a sexually transmitted infection (STI), because health officials were under no obligation to discuss someone’s sexual health in a case where one person tested positive for HIV, for example, and the other was negative.

She made the statement in the context of February being the month of love, noting that where there was love and intimacy, there would be “quite a bit of sex”.

“We are saying at this time of the year in February love equals having the HIV and any STI tests together because it’s the only time that one gets to know the true status of their partner. Unless you’re tested as a couple, we have no permission, none whatsoever, to be able to pass on any information to anybody,” she explained.

Slinger-Folkes said after getting the HIV test, some partners feared revealing the truth, either to avoid being blamed or the stigma associated with contracting the disease. She said the Ministry of Health provided excellent couple counselling and support where they would address the issues arising from a mixed result.

She bemoaned that the focus shifted away from HIV and STIs and people “started wearing masks and stopped wearing condoms”.

Condom use

“Instead what they do, they use a condom for the first time and, after that, the condom is removed because we are now officially in a relationship. We don’t want people to do that. We want people to take responsibility rather than blame . . . . Unless you were raped, God forbid, you have a responsibility

to protect yourself. You have a responsibility to take responsibility for your own sexual health.”

The HIV education officer, one of the first people trained as a counsellor with the National HIV/AIDS Hotline, said with the anti-retroviral dugs available, people could live longer and healthier lives with the illness. She debunked the idea that people were more careless with sexual practices because those drugs were available.

“No one really wants to become infected, but what we seek to undermine is the power of sex. We lose control when those feelings [hit] because it’s not a feeling that I can describe to you or anybody can describe, but we know it’s a good feeling and so people give way to that feeling.”

After the act, Slinger-Folkes said, came the realisation there was no discussion about protection. She said couples discussed finances and a lot of issues when thinking about marriage, and sexual health should also be in that list because that was when people became really intimate.

She lamented the fact that there was little discussion on HIV and, while she had no official statistics, there was a “climbing” in the numbers of people getting infected.

“I think people are not thinking that HIV is an STI and there are other STIs like I mentioned – herpes, syphilis, gonorrhoea and chlamydia. Those are those ones that we are seeing and hearing about in the programme.”

Slinger-Folkes said her message was to males, females, the young and elderly to protect themselves and take charge of their sexual health. (SAT)