Factors that cause contagion and spread of HIV among people from social risk groups

Abstract

Despite all significant efforts being made by the public healthcare, state authorities, and public organizations, HIV-infection has been a topical issue over the last 30 years. Commercial sex workers (CSW) are a basic risk group when it comes down to this infection. Our research goal was to determine HIV prevalence among commercial sex workers and risk factors that cause their contagion with it. We performed an epidemiologic analytical ecologic examination to study HIV prevalence risk factors that cause spread of this infection among CSW. 154 CSW were questioned with a sociological procedure applied to do it; they lived in three cities in Perm region, and morbidity with HIV was higher than on average in the region in two of them, B. and K. The city P. was taken as a reference territory due to a relatively favorable situation with HIV infection spread there. Risk factors that caused HIV infection were determined via an observational analytical case-control study; the «case» group was made up of 46 CSW who were infected with HIV and the control group included 108 CSW who didn’t have this infection. All the obtained data were statistically processed with SPSS Statistics 17.0 and Statistica 6.0 software packages. HIV prevalence among commercial sex workers was rather different on the examined territories. It amounted to 42.6% and 35.0% in cities B. and K. and it was 2.3 and 1.9 times higher accordingly than in city P. It was detected that there were several factors making for HIV infection spread among CSW; they were high morbidity with HIV on a given territory; an early start of sexual life; disregard of contraception; drug abuse; medical services and prevention programs being hardly available to CSW. A high probability that CSW would get infected with HIV was determined for people who didn’t use condoms, took drugs intravenously, and were not epidemiologically alerted to HIV infection.