ru2hot?: A public health education campaign for men who have sex with men to increase awareness of symptoms of acute HIV infection.

Objectives: Teach HIV-negative men who have sex with men (MSM) symptoms of acute HIV infection (AHI) and direct them to nucleic acid amplification testing (NAAT) though Public Health--Seattle & King County (PHSKC).

Design: Cross-sectional surveys, retrospective database analysis and chart review.

Methods: Beginning in June 2009, the ru2hot? campaign described AHI symptoms and NAAT. Two preintervention and two postintervention surveys assessed campaign visibility, symptom knowledge, and healthcare-seeking behaviour. Regression analyses evaluated secular trends in case-finding.

Results: 366 MSM completed surveys. In survey 4, 23% of 100 men reported seeing the campaign, and 25% knew 'ru2hot?' referred to AHI. From survey 1 to survey 4, the proportion of subjects who knew ≥2 symptoms or that AHI was a 'flu-like' illness was unchanged (61% vs 57%, p=0.6). However, in survey 4, 13 (72%) of 18 subjects who saw the campaign named fever as a symptom of AHI compared with 19 (35%) of 55 subjects who had not seen the campaign (p=0.005). From 9/2003 to 12/2010, 622 (2.2%) of 27 661 MSM tested HIV-positive, and 111 (18%) were identified by the Public Health--Seattle & King County NAAT programme. In terms of the impact of the campaign on case-finding, diagnosis of EIA-negative/NAAT-positive and OraQuick-negative/EIA-positive cases increased from six in 2004 to 20 in 2010 (p=0.01), but postcampaign numbers were unchanged. 23 (51%) of 45 cases identified before and 8 (44%) of 18 cases identified after the campaign reported symptoms at initial testing (p=0.6).

Conclusions: Although a quarter of MSM surveyed saw the campaign and knowledge of fever (the symptom of emphasis) was high, case-finding was unchanged. Increasing campaign visibility could have had greater impact.