Allegheny County is expanding its free, at-home testing program for sexually transmitted infections to anyone over the age of 18.
The Allegheny County Health Department first opened the pilot program to residents ages 18 to 24 in November. Since then, the county and its partner, Color Health, have distributed more than 500 testing kits for gonorrhea and chlamydia.
A few hundred others, however, attempted to get a test but were screened out because they didn’t qualify, according to Barbara Nightingale, the county’s deputy director of clinical services.
“So that was why right now we chose first to continue with just gonorrhea and chlamydia, focusing on the really high prevalence [of those] in the county,” Nightingale said, “but making sure that people that otherwise don't have access can get it.”
Residents can request a test kit online, or at Hilltop Pharmacy on Warrington Avenue in Allentown.
“They can also have the kit either mailed directly to their house and it's packaged really discreetly, so nobody else in the house knows what's in there,” Nightingale said.
Residents can then provide a sample, mail it back to the lab and review their results online. If a resident tests positive for either disease, a member of the health department will contact them and provide treatment options and resources.
Officials say diagnosing the infection early can help limit the immediate discomfort of symptoms and reduce the spread to others.
For the first six months of the pilot, the department measured its success through positivity rates: 5% of all tests returned positive for chlamydia, while the positivity rate for gonorrhea sat at 1%.
“We want to make sure that we are getting access to people that have [a] high risk of gonorrhea and chlamydia who might otherwise not have access to testing,” Nightingale explained. “So we want the numbers to be above 3% to make sure that we've actually targeted that group correctly.”
Depending on the success of the expanded pilot, Nightingale said the county hopes to make the program permanent by the fall, along with options to test for HIV and syphilis.
