On November 5, 2026, ahead of World AIDS Day, France's national public-health agency Santé publique France (SpF) published its 2025 HIV surveillance report. It shows 9 million laboratory HIV tests in 2025, up 7% on 2024. SpF credits much of the growth to "Mon test IST," the national scheme that lets anyone walk into a participating lab and get tested without a prescription and without paying upfront. The scheme accounted for 2.3 million tests, about 25% of the total. According to Tech Times' summary of the programme, the same walk-in route covers HIV, gonorrhoea, chlamydia, syphilis and hepatitis B.

Why It Matters

"Mon test IST" is the clearest real-world evidence so far that **removing the prescription step** grows STI testing volume quickly, by about a quarter of national HIV testing within its first years. That supports the at-home and walk-in testing businesses (Everlywell, myLAB Box, NHS-commissioned kits in the UK) that argue friction, not demand, is the main barrier. The flat incidence and flat MSM diagnoses are the warning: testing more finds the existing undiagnosed pool, but it doesn't reduce transmission unless it feeds into PrEP. That is the gap long-acting options such as twice-yearly lenacapavir, and the telehealth distributors racing to sell them, are trying to close. For brands, a government-backed, no-prescription, no-upfront-cost model sets a high bar for consumer convenience. Paid DTC test kits will have to compete on speed, privacy and bundled treatment rather than access alone.

The diagnosis numbers are moving the right way. 4,983 people learned they were HIV-positive in 2025, compared with 5,318 in 2023. Diagnoses fell among people born abroad (-11% since 2023). Early diagnoses have risen 26% since 2020, and late diagnoses have been trending down since 2023. SpF director-general Dr Etienne Pot said in the release that 2025 showed "concrete progress" and cited an 18% drop in new positive diagnoses. The release doesn't say what baseline that 18% uses, and the counts it publishes (5,318 to 4,983) are about a 6% fall from 2023. One group did not improve: new diagnoses among men who have sex with men were flat. SpF calls this a break from the steady decline seen among French-born MSM up to 2022.

The key caveat is in the agency's own text: the improvements "are not yet reflected in incidence figures, which have remained stable since 2023." Tech Times, citing the bulletin, puts incidence at roughly 50 new infections per million people, or about 3,464 a year. SpF estimates 8,463 people in France were living with undiagnosed HIV in 2025. Its prescription is more repeat testing and wider use of combination prevention (PrEP, condoms, treatment-as-prevention). Its December campaign, "Vivre avec le VIH, c'est d'abord vivre," centres on undetectable = untransmittable.

Sources

Update — 2026-11-09

Initial entry — story first created.