Role of direct and indirect social and spatial ties in the diffusion of HIV and HCV among people who inject drugs: A cross-sectional community-based network analysis in New Delhi, India
- Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, United States
- Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, United States
- YR Gaitonde Centre for AIDS Research and Education, India
Abstract
Background:People who inject drugs (PWID) account for some of the most explosive HIV and hepatitis C virus (HCV) epidemics globally. While individual drivers of infection are well understood, less is known about network factors, with minimal data beyond direct ties.
Methods:2,512 PWID in New Delhi, India were recruited in 2017-19 using a sociometric network design. Sampling was initiated with 10 indexes who recruited named injection partners (people who they injected with in the prior month). Each recruit then recruited their named injection partners following the same process with cross-network linkages established by biometric data. Participants responded to a survey, including information on injection locations, and provided a blood sample. Factors associated with HIV/HCV infection were identified using logistic regression.
Results:Median age was 26; 99% were male. Baseline HIV prevalence was 37.0% and 46.8% were actively infected with HCV (HCV RNA positive). The odds of prevalent HIV and active HCV infection decreased with each additional degree of separation from an infected alter (HIV AOR: 0.87; HCV AOR: 0.90) and increased among those who injected at a specific location (HIV AOR: 1.50; HCV AOR: 1.69) independent of individual-level factors (p<0.001). Additionally, sociometric factors e.g., network distance to an infected alter, were statistically significant predictors even when considering immediate egocentric ties.
Conclusions:These data demonstrate an extremely high burden of HIV and HCV infection and a highly interconnected injection and spatial network structure. Incorporating network and spatial data into the design/implementation of interventions may help interrupt transmission while improving efficiency.
Funding:National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Johns Hopkins University Center for AIDS Research.
Data availability
An interactive version of the sociospatial network and underlying data are available from: https://github.com/sclipman/sociospatial-baseline.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA041736)
- Sunil S Solomon
National Institute on Drug Abuse (DP2DA040244)
- Sunil S Solomon
National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA041034)
- Shruti H Mehta
- Gregory M Lucas
National Institute on Drug Abuse (K24DA035684)
- Gregory M Lucas
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (P30AI094189)
- Shruti H Mehta
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: The study protocol was approved by institutional review boards at Johns Hopkins Medicine (IRB00110421) and the YR Gaitonde Centre for AIDS Research and Education in India (YRG292). All participants provided written informed consent.
Reviewing Editor
- Jennifer Flegg, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Version history
- Received: April 7, 2021
- Accepted: July 15, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: August 3, 2021 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: August 17, 2021 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2021, Clipman et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Role of direct and indirect social and spatial ties in the diffusion of HIV and HCV among people who inject drugs: A cross-sectional community-based network analysis in New Delhi, India
eLife 10:e69174.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.69174
Further reading
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- Epidemiology and Global Health
Background:
In most of the world, the mammography screening programmes were paused at the start of the pandemic, whilst mammography screening continued in Denmark. We examined the mammography screening participation during the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark.
Methods:
The study population comprised all women aged 50–69 years old invited to participate in mammography screening from 2016 to 2021 in Denmark based on data from the Danish Quality Database for Mammography Screening in combination with population-based registries. Using a generalised linear model, we estimated prevalence ratios (PRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of mammography screening participation within 90, 180, and 365 d since invitation during the pandemic in comparison with the previous years adjusting for age, year and month of invitation.
Results:
The study comprised 1,828,791 invitations among 847,766 women. Before the pandemic, 80.2% of invitations resulted in participation in mammography screening within 90 d, 82.7% within 180 d, and 83.1% within 365 d. At the start of the pandemic, the participation in screening within 90 d was reduced to 69.9% for those invited in pre-lockdown and to 76.5% for those invited in first lockdown. Extending the length of follow-up time to 365 d only a minor overall reduction was observed (PR = 0.94; 95% CI: 0.93–0.95 in pre-lockdown and PR = 0.97; 95% CI: 0.96–0.97 in first lockdown). A lower participation was, however, seen among immigrants and among women with a low income.
Conclusions:
The short-term participation in mammography screening was reduced at the start of the pandemic, whilst only a minor reduction in the overall participation was observed with longer follow-up time, indicating that women postponed screening. Some groups of women, nonetheless, had a lower participation, indicating that the social inequity in screening participation was exacerbated during the pandemic.
Funding:
The study was funded by the Danish Cancer Society Scientific Committee (grant number R321-A17417) and the Danish regions.
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- Epidemiology and Global Health
- Genetics and Genomics
Accurate inference of who infected whom in an infectious disease outbreak is critical for the delivery of effective infection prevention and control. The increased resolution of pathogen whole-genome sequencing has significantly improved our ability to infer transmission events. Despite this, transmission inference often remains limited by the lack of genomic variation between the source case and infected contacts. Although within-host genetic diversity is common among a wide variety of pathogens, conventional whole-genome sequencing phylogenetic approaches exclusively use consensus sequences, which consider only the most prevalent nucleotide at each position and therefore fail to capture low frequency variation within samples. We hypothesized that including within-sample variation in a phylogenetic model would help to identify who infected whom in instances in which this was previously impossible. Using whole-genome sequences from SARS-CoV-2 multi-institutional outbreaks as an example, we show how within-sample diversity is partially maintained among repeated serial samples from the same host, it can transmitted between those cases with known epidemiological links, and how this improves phylogenetic inference and our understanding of who infected whom. Our technique is applicable to other infectious diseases and has immediate clinical utility in infection prevention and control.
