Modeling secondary level of HIV contact tracing: its impact on HIV intervention in Cuba

BMC Infectious Diseases

Research Article

Yun-Shih Wang¹  Hector de Arazoza²  Ying-Hen Hsieh³  Rachid Lounes⁴ 

[1] Department of Applied Mathematics, National Chung Hsing University, 402, Taichung, Taiwan;Department of Mathematics, University of La Habana, Havana, Cuba;Department of Public Health and Institute of Biostatistics, China Medical University, 404, Taichung, Taiwan;Laboratoire MAP5, Université Paris Descartes, UMR-CNRS 8145, Paris, France;

关键词: Cuban;    Endemic Equilibrium;    Approximate Bayesian Computation;    Sexual Network;    Random Screening;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2334-10-194

 received in 2009-09-08, accepted in 2010-07-01,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundUniversal HIV testing/treatment program has currently been suggested and debated as a useful strategy for elimination of HIV epidemic in Africa, although not without practical issues regarding the costs and feasibility of a fully implemented program.MethodsA mathematical model is proposed which considers two levels of detection of HIV-infectives through contact tracing of known infectives in addition to detections through other means such as random screening. Simulations based on Cuban contact tracing data were performed to ascertain the potential impact of the different levels of contact tracing.ResultsSimulation studies illustrate that: (1) contact tracing is an important intervention measure which, while less effective than random screening, is perhaps less costly and hence ideal for large-scale intervention programs in developing countries with less resources; (2) the secondary level of contact tracing could significantly change the basic disease transmission dynamics, depending on the parameter values; (3) the prevalence of the epidemic at the time of implementation of contact tracing program might be a crucial factor in determining whether the measure will be effective in preventing disease infections and its eventual eradication.ConclusionsOur results indicate that contact tracing for detection of HIV infectives could be suitably used to remedy inadequacies in a universal HIV testing program when designing timely and effective intervention measures.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Hsieh et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.