Schistosoma and Strongyloides screening in migrants initiating HIV Care in Canada: a cross sectional study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Following migration from Schistosoma and Strongyloides endemic to non-endemic regions, people remain at high risk for adverse sequelae from these chronic infections. HIV co-infected persons are particularly vulnerable to the serious and potentially fatal consequences of untreated helminth infection. While general screening guidelines exist for parasitic infection screening in immigrant populations, they remain silent on HIV positive populations. This study assessed the seroprevalence, epidemiology and laboratory characteristics of these two parasitic infections in a non-endemic setting in an immigrant/refugee HIV positive community. METHODS: Between February 2015 and 2018 individuals born outside of Canada receiving care at the centralized HIV clinic serving southern Alberta, Canada were screened by serology and direct stool analysis for schistosomiasis and strongyloidiasis. Canadian born persons with travel-based exposure risk factors were also screened. Epidemiologic and laboratory values were analyzed using bivariate logistic regression. We assessed the screening utility of serology, direct stool analysis, eosinophilia and hematuria. RESULTS: (2.46, 1.02-5.92) were associated with positive Schistosoma serology. Eosinophilia (11.31, 2.03-58.94) was associated with positive Strongyloides serology. No Schistosoma or Strongyloides parasites were identified by direct stool microscopy. Eosinophilia had poor sensitivity for identification of positive serology. Hematuria was not associated with positive Schistosoma serology. CONCLUSION: Positive Schistosoma and Strongyloides serology was common in this migrant HIV positive population receiving HIV care in Southern Alberta. This supports the value of routine parasitic screening as part of standard HIV care in non-endemic areas. Given the high morbidity and mortality in this relatively immunosuppressed population, especially for Strongyloides infection, screening should include both serologic and direct parasitological tests. Eosinophilia and hematuria should not be used for Schistosoma and Strongyloides serologic screening in HIV positive migrants in non-endemic settings.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".