National findings from the Tracks survey of people who inject drugs in Canada, Phase 4, 2017–2019
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The Tracks survey of people who inject drugs (PWID) collected data in 14 sentinel sites across Canada (2017-2019). Objective: To describe the prevalence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and hepatitis C and associated risk behaviours and to examine trends over time. Methods: Information regarding socio-demographics, social determinants of health, use of prevention services and testing, drug use, risk behaviours, and HIV and hepatitis C testing, care and treatment was collected through interviewer-administered questionnaires. Biological samples were tested for HIV, hepatitis C antibodies and hepatitis C ribonucleic acid (RNA). Descriptive statistics were calculated and trends over time were assessed. Results: Of the 2,383 participants, 65.6% were cisgender male, 42.2% were Indigenous, 48.0% completed some high school or less, 62.6% lived in unstable housing and 75.7% had ever been incarcerated. Average age was 40.1 years. The majority experienced stigma and discrimination (88.7%) and physical, sexual and/or emotional abuse in childhood (85.0%) or with a sexual partner (75.9%). The majority reported use of a needle/syringe distribution program (90.1%) and tested for HIV (90.5%) and hepatitis C (90.9%).Among participants who had ever had sex, the majority (59.2%) reported inconsistent condom use during vaginal and/or anal sex with a casual sex partner. Prevalence of HIV was 10.3% (82.9% were aware of infection status) and many (36.9%) were hepatitis C RNA-positive (50.1% were aware of infection status).Most surveillance indicators remained relatively stable from Phase 1 to Phase 4. Changes were found in substances used, and improvements were noted related to HIV and hepatitis C prevalence and care cascade indicators. Conclusion: Many PWID in Canada were living in unstable housing and experienced high levels of stigma and discrimination. Prevalence of HIV and hepatitis C was high in some areas. These findings contribute to the evidence base used to inform targeted prevention and control measures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it