A population-based study of chronic hepatitis C in immigrants and non-immigrants in Quebec, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Immigrants originating from intermediate and high HCV prevalence countries may be at increased risk of exposure to hepatitis C infection (HCV) in their countries of origin, however they are not routinely screened after arrival in most low HCV prevalence host countries. We aimed to describe the epidemiology of HCV in immigrants compared to the Canadian born population. METHODS: Using the reportable infectious disease database linked to the landed immigration database and several provincial administrative databases, we assembled a cohort of all reported cases of HCV in Quebec, Canada (1998-2008). Underlying co-morbidities were identified in the health services databases. Stratum specific rates of reported cases/100,000, rate ratios (RRs) and trends over the study period were estimated. RESULTS: A total of 20,862 patients with HCV were identified, among whom 1922 (9.2%) were immigrants. Immigrants were older and diagnosed a mean of 9.8 ± 7 years after arrival. The Canadian born population was more likely to have behavior co-morbidities (problematic alcohol or drug use) and HIV co-infection. Immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe had the highest HCV reported rates with RRs compared to non-immigrants ranging from 1.5 to 1.7. The age and sex adjusted rates decreased by 4.9% per year in non-immigrants but remained unchanged in immigrants. The proportion of HCV occurring in immigrants doubled over the study period from 5 to 11%. CONCLUSIONS: Immigrants from intermediate and high HCV prevalence countries are at increased risk for HCV and had a mean delay in diagnosis of almost 10 years after arrival suggesting that they may benefit from targeted HCV screening and earlier linkage to care.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".