Yes. HIV self-testing allows people to take an HIV test and find out their result in their home or other private location. There are two kinds: Rapid tests are often referred to as point-of-care tests because rather than sending a blood sample to a laboratory, the test can be conducted and the result read in a doctor’s office or a community setting, without specialised laboratory equipment. By making the test widely available, Boots UK helps accessibility of self-testing reach a ‘turning point’ on the UK high street and helps support the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) and partners to meet the ‘90-90-90 targets’ to beat AIDS by 2030. [3]

If you get an HIV test outside of a health care setting or lab—such as at a community-based organization, mobile testing van, or elsewhere—you will likely receive a rapid HIV test.Because of the possibility that a positive result from a single HIV test is, in fact, a false positive, the result is described as 'reactive' rather than 'positive'. If the result is reactive, this indicates that the test has reacted to something in the blood and needs to be investigated with follow-up tests. In people who are taking pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) or post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP). If you acquire HIV, you may have a delayed antibody response, extending the window period. In an effort to provide nucleic acid-based diagnostics that are more suitable for point of care and self-testing scenarios, several alternatives offer less stringent requirements for sample preparation and remove the need for thermal cycling equipment, while still providing enzymatic amplification of a specific RNA or DNA sequence. Approaches that have gained considerable attention include loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP), recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA), nucleic acid sequence-based amplification (NASBA), Rolling Circle Amplification (RCA), helicase dependent amplification (HDA), and Strand Displacement Amplification (SDA). Compared to RT-PCR, these methods provide advantages that include simplified sample preparation, less stringent temperature control, high amplification efficiency, reduced sensitivity to amplification inhibitors, and greater tolerance for detecting a target sequence within unprocessed samples, making these assays simpler to translate to POC self-testing environments. Moreover, isothermal amplification techniques can incorporate reverse transcription, expanding the detection to RNA targets such as HIV genomes [ 122]. It has a proven clinical sensitivity (if a person has HIV how often the test will be positive) of >99.9%, this means that on average 999 in every 1,000 positive results will be correct.

If you are testing with a rapid, point-of-care test and you are concerned that you may have been exposed to HIV during the test’s window period, you could also be tested with a fourth-generation laboratory test. This requires a blood sample, taken through a needle from a vein in the arm, which is tested in a laboratory using a more sensitive test. The results should be available after a few days. Situations in which rapid tests may not be accurate There were more invalid results in people using blood-based tests (0.4-9.5%) than studies using oral fluid-based tests (0.2-4.5%). Common errors included incorrect or incomplete specimen collection, spilling or incorrect use of the buffer solution, problems transferring blood samples, and difficulties with the interpretation of results. Negative (may also be described as ‘non-reactive’). The test did not find any evidence of HIV infection. You probably don’t have HIV (so long as you aren’t testing in one of the situations described in the last section). Due to their simplicity and low cost, lateral flow assay (LFA)-based diagnostic devices have been widely adopted for diagnostic scenarios where rapid results are required [ 27]. LFA-based tests can be performed on a variety of biological samples, including sweat, saliva, plasma, serum, and whole blood. The testing does not require expensive laboratory equipment and the results are available in 5–30 min. Moreover, sample quantity required for detection is less than needed for conventional confirmatory HIV diagnostic assays, such as enzyme linked immunoassay (ELISA), thereby allowing affordable, sensitive, specific, user friendly, rapid, equipment free, and deliverable (ASSURED) detection of HIV infections.

There are many HIV self-tests that do not have this special in-built feature and will produce a clear control line even if no sample has been added. You will see this as a negative result which may actually be incorrect.