The Seroprevalence of Hepatitis C Antibodies in Immigrants and Refugees from Intermediate and High Endemic Countries: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND & AIMS: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a significant global health issue that leads to 350,000 preventable deaths annually due to associated cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Immigrants and refugees (migrants) originating from intermediate/high HCV endemic countries are likely at increased risk for HCV infection due to HCV exposure in their countries of origin. The aim of this study was to estimate the HCV seroprevalence of the migrant population living in low HCV prevalence countries. METHODS: Four electronic databases were searched from database inception until June 17, 2014 for studies reporting the prevalence of HCV antibodies among migrants. Seroprevalence estimates were pooled with a random-effect model and were stratified by age group, region of origin and migration status and a meta-regression was modeled to explore heterogeneity. RESULTS: Data from 50 studies representing 38,635 migrants from all world regions were included. The overall anti-HCV prevalence (representing previous and current infections) was 1.9% (95% CI, 1.4-2.7%, I2 96.1). Older age and region of origin, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe were the strongest predictors of HCV seroprevalence. The estimated HCV seroprevalence of migrants from these regions was >2% and is higher than that reported for most host populations. CONCLUSION: Adult migrants originating from Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe are at increased risk for HCV and may benefit from targeted HCV screening.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.011 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".