Twin epidemics of new and prevalent hepatitis C infections in Canada: BC Hepatitis Testers Cohort
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: We characterized the twin epidemics of new and prevalent hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections in British Columbia, Canada to inform prevention, care and treatment programs. METHODS: The BC Hepatitis Testers Cohort (BC-HTC) includes individuals tested for HCV, HIV or reported as a case of HBV, HCV, HIV or active TB between 1990-2013 linked with data on their medical visits, hospitalizations, cancers, prescription drugs and mortality. Prevalent infection was defined as being anti-HCV positive at first test. Those with a negative test followed by a positive test were considered seroconverters or new infections. RESULTS: Of 1,132,855 individuals tested for HCV, 64,634 (5.8 %) were positive and an additional 3092 cases tested positive elsewhere for a total of 67,726. Of 55,781 HCV positive individuals alive at the end of 2013, 7064 were seroconverters while 48,717 had prevalent infection at diagnosis. The HCV positivity rate (11.2 %) was highest in birth cohort 1945-1964 which declined over time. New infections were more likely to be male, 15-34 years of age (born 1965-1984), HIV- or HBV-coinfected, socioeconomically disadvantaged, have problematic drug and alcohol use and a mental health illness. The profile was similar for individuals with prevalent infection, except for lower odds of HBV-coinfection, major mental health diagnoses and birth cohort >1975. CONCLUSIONS: The HCV positivity rate is highest in birth cohort 1945-1964 which represents most prevalent infections. New infections occur in younger birth cohorts who are commonly coinfected with HIV and/or HBV, socioeconomically marginalized, and living with mental illness and addictions.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".