How social media became a ‘Wild West’ for sexual health testing

Non-professionals are able to purchase U-Test brand Syphilis and Gonorrhea + Chlamydia test kits.

Ashleigh Furlong and Lucca de Paoli

U-Test’s brand ambassadors aren’t medical professionals. The British company sells test kits for sexually transmitted infections, and bowel and prostate health over social media, so the faces of its business are - loosely - online celebrities: a former Welsh rugby player, an Ibiza club owner and an OnlyFans model. In some of its marketing campaigns, it featured a famous adult performer, Bonnie Blue, lying next to a grinning man holding a U-Test-branded gonorrhea and chlamydia kit.

Some of the tests it sells, however, require users to have quite a lot of medical knowledge. Bloomberg News ordered a gonorrhea and chlamydia test from the company, which was marketed as a “simple at-home test-no doctor visits”. It arrived with slick branding on the packets, but an instruction leaflet in dense technical language and a warning that it should only be administered by a specialist: “for professional in vitro diagnostic use only”.

“No one is going to understand that,” Takudzwa Mukiwa, head of HIV prevention at sexual health NGO the Terrence Higgins Trust, said when he looked at the booklet.