Social network approaches to locating people recently infected with HIV in Odessa, Ukraine

Abstract

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 large‐scale Ukrainian epidemic. Locating and intervening with people who recently became infected with HIV (people with recent infection, or Pw RI ) can reduce forward HIV transmission and help Pw RI remain healthy. Methods The Transmission Reduction Intervention Project ( TRIP ) recruited recently‐infected and longer‐term 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 Pw RI were compared between TRIP arms (i.e. networks of recently‐infected seeds vs. networks of longer‐term infected seeds) and to the proportion of participants who were Pw RI in an RDS ‐based Integrated Biobehavioral Surveillance of people who inject drugs in 2013. Results The networks of Pw RI seeds and those of longer‐term infected seeds had similar (2%) proportions who were themselves Pw RI . 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 ingredients‐based methods found that TRIP spent no more than US $4513 per Pw RI located whereas IBBS spent $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 ‐positive are a cost‐effective way to locate Pw RI and reduce HIV transmission and should therefore be implemented.

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“…Viral geographic transition flow that might be associated with the military conflict in the East, where the conflict started was traced all over the country and all cases were officially according to the national case report as previously described(5). Chi-square tests of independence for the association of demographic data with HIV subtype were performed in R v3.6.2 (24) using the gplots and corrplots packages (25,26) and linear regression and correlation coincident were calculated in MATLAB® v2020a and regarded a significant with p values < 0.05 (27)…”

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“He's under oath”: Privacy and Confidentiality Views Among People Who Inject Drugs Enrolled in a Study of Social Networks and Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Hepatitis C Virus Risk

“…In recent decades, social networks research has contributed to important gains in knowledge critical to programs designed to decrease the spread of infectious diseases (i.e., hepatitis C virus [HCV], human immunodeficiency virus [HIV], and other sexually transmitted diseases [STIs]) to chronic conditions (i.e., tobacco use and obesity) (Flath et al, 2018; Maddox et al, 2014; Morris, 2004; Rothenberg et al, 1998; Valente & Pitts, 2017; Valente et al, 2004; Williams et al, 2019; Wu et al, 2018). The relational data collected through social network analysis (Tubaro, 2014) are particularly important for epidemiological research, mapping how a virus or infectious diseases spread from one person to another within a particular group (Smith & Christakis, 2008).…”