A pilot behavioural and biological surveillance survey for HIV and other bloodborne infections among Aboriginal people in Regina, Saskatchewan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Aboriginal people in Canada are disproportionately affected by HIV and other blood-borne infections. A-Track is a national public health surveillance system designed to monitor HIV and related infections, behaviours and socio-demographic factors among Aboriginal populations in Canada. The pilot survey for the A-Track surveillance system, the first of its kind in Canada, was conducted in Regina, Saskatchewan and implemented via a community and public health partnership. OBJECTIVE: To assess the prevalence of HIV, hepatitis C, syphilis and associated risk behaviours and socio-demographic factors among Aboriginal people in Regina, Saskatchewan. This focus of the pilot survey was to provide this surveillance information for public health action and to determine whether this type of public health surveillance activity could be conducted in an urban setting across Canada. METHODS: Survey participants were self-identified Aboriginal people (First Nations, Inuit or Métis) or those who claimed Aboriginal ancestry and between the ages of 16 and 60 years. These individuals were also asked to provide a blood sample for HIV, hepatitis C and syphilis antibody testing. Descriptive analyses were performed with sex-based comparisons. RESULTS: There were 1064 people who participated in the survey. Their average age was 33 years and 51% were male. The majority of participants (93%) lived in urban Regina at the time of the survey. Just over half (53.2%) of all participants had been removed from their families during childhood; 29.9% had lived in a residential or boarding school during childhood; and 57.7% had lived at some point in a correctional facility. Among the 1,045 participants who provided a blood sample of sufficient quantity for testing, 5.2% were HIV seropositive and 55.8% of these were aware of their HIV status. The lifetime exposure to hepatitis C was 41.6%, with significantly higher proportions of males than females testing positive for hepatitis C exposure. Syphilis seroprevalence was very low (<1%). Almost three-quarters (71.5%) of participants reported being tested for HIV at least once in their lifetime and among those ever tested, 67.6% had been tested during the 12 months prior to the interview. CONCLUSION: Aboriginal people are disproportionately affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Canada. The findings from the A-Track pilot survey can be used to inform and evaluate prevention and treatment services for HIV and other related infections among Aboriginal people. Lessons learned from the pilot survey could also be used to guide the possible implementation of A-Track in other urban and/or reserve locations in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".