2 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Social network approaches to locating people recently infected with HIV in Odessa, Ukraine
Introduction
This paper examines the extent to which an intervention succeeded in locating people who had recently become infected with HIV in the context of the largeâscale Ukrainian epidemic. Locating and intervening with people who recently became infected with HIV (people with recent infection, or PwRI ) can reduce forward HIV transmission and help PwRI remain healthy.
Methods
The Transmission Reduction Intervention Project (TRIP ) recruited recentlyâinfected and longerâterm infected seeds in Odessa, Ukraine, in 2013 to 2016, and asked them to help recruit their extended risk network members. The proportions of network members who were PwRI were compared between TRIP arms (i.e. networks of recentlyâinfected seeds vs. networks of longerâterm infected seeds) and to the proportion of participants who were PwRI in an RDS âbased Integrated Biobehavioral Surveillance of people who inject drugs in 2013.
Results
The networks of PwRI seeds and those of longerâterm infected seeds had similar (2%) proportions who were themselves PwRI . This was higher than the 0.25% proportion in IBBS (OR = 7.80; p = 0.016). The odds ratio among the subset of participants who injected drugs was 11.17 (p = 0.003). Cost comparison analyses using simplified ingredientsâbased methods found that TRIP spent no more than US 11,924.
Conclusions
Further research is needed to confirm these results and improve TRIP further, but our findings suggest that interventions that trace the networks of people who test HIV âpositive are a costâeffective way to locate PwRI and reduce HIV transmission and should therefore be implemented