A survey of Swiss gay men and men who have sex with men recruited through the Grindr networking app has found that while only 4.3% had taken HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), 50% would consider taking it within the next six months and 79% would either take it some time in the future or want to learn more about it.

The survey was a brief one both in terms of its appearance online (from 5 to 24 January this year) and in terms of its length (only ten questions taking, it was estimated, a minute to answer on average). Of interest is the fact that GPS data was used to ensure that respondents were actually located in Switzerland, though it could not rule out non-residents. The survey ensured anonymity by redirecting participants to Surveymonkey to actually answer the survey and no identifying details were collected.

There has only been one previous survey of PrEP opinion in Switzerland, conducted in 2015 and published last year. In this 39% of respondents said they would be interested in using PrEP. A 2016 Europe-wide survey conducted by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) using the social app Hornet found that 31% said they were “very likely” to use PrEP in the next six months and 10% said they had already taken it. Another 2016 survey, Flash!PrEP, found that 44% were interested in taking PrEP and that 5% had already taken “informal” PrEP, i.e. not sourced through the healthcare system. Flash!PrEP was not just for gay men and while 62% of men had heard of PrEP, only 27% of women had. This Swiss survey, then, reports twice as much interest in PrEP as was seen in surveys from only a year ago. Read more via AIDSmap