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Venue-based HIV screening reaches at-risk populations
Study findings indicated that venue-based screening in high-prevalence areas of San Diego County successfully reached at-risk populations in lower-prevalence areas, suggesting that targeted testing in high-prevalence areas could “at least to some extent” lead to at-risk patients in other areas being screened, researchers reported in Open Forum Infectious Diseases.
“Understanding the relationships between screening efforts, sexually transmitted infection (STI) rates, HIV prevalence, and HIV incidence in different communities could provide new insight on how to optimize targeting of screening for HIV and STI,” Antoine Chaillon, MD, PhD, assistant professor of infectious diseases at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues wrote.
Chaillon and colleagues collected San Diego County HIV case and testing data, STI data and sociodemographic data from the San Diego Health and Human Services Agency and the Early Test community-based HIV screening program between 1998 and 2016. According to the study, they then evaluated zip code-level relationships between HIV diagnoses, HIV prevalence and STI diagnoses.
In total, 379,074 HIV tests were performed. According to the study, the numbers of HIV tests performed on patients residing in a zip code or region strongly correlated with prevalent HIV cases (coefficient of determination [R2] = 0.714), new HIV diagnoses (R2 = 0.798), and STI diagnoses (R2 = 0.768 for chlamydia; R2 = 0.836 for gonorrhea; R2 = 0.655 for syphilis) in those regions.
“Even though the vast majority of screening tests occurred at fixed venues located in high-prevalence areas, screening of residents of lower prevalence areas was usually proportional to the prevalence HIV and rates of new HIV and STI diagnoses in those locales,” Chaillon and colleagues wrote. “In other words, at-risk persons from low prevalence areas of the county were able to travel to these testing venues for HIV screening.”
The researchers said their study “supported the ability of a small number of standalone testing centers to reach at-risk populations dispersed across the county.”
“More importantly, these methods can highlight geographic areas, or demographic segments that may benefit from more intensive screening. Changing demographics of the HIV epidemic in San Diego need to be considered to continue optimizing screening strategies to reach individuals that the current testing centers are not reaching.”– by Caitlyn Stulpin
Disclosures: The authors report no relevant financial disclosures.