HEPATITIS C AMONG PEOPLE EXPERIENCING HOMELESSNESS IN CHILE: PREVALENCE AND ASSOCIATED FACTORS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) poses a global health threat, especially among people experiencing homelessness (PEH), but data from Latin America are scarce. We prospectively screened 800 PEH in Santiago, Chile, using rapid HCV antibody tests with confirmatory RNA testing. Sociodemographic and clinical data were collected through structured interviews. We identified four HCV-positive individuals, corresponding to a prevalence of 0.5%. The median age was 44.1 years (±14.8), and 39.7% of the cohort were women. At screening, 63.5% lived on the street and 36.5% in shelters. All four HCV-positive individuals were Chilean; three were men. Two had tattoos and reported high-risk sexual behavior; one had a history of blood transfusion. Three reported heavy alcohol use and two used cocaine, though none had a history of injection drug use. Two had cirrhosis. All received support from social services and engaged in informal work. None were coinfected with HBV or HIV. Only one patient initiated and completed DAA therapy, achieving sustained virologic response. Barriers to treatment included lack of insurance, referral delays, and loss to follow-up. No sociodemographic factors were statistically associated with HCV infection in univariate analysis (e.g., age OR 1.03, p=0.385; male sex OR 0.83, p=0.888; street vs. shelter OR 1.09, p=0.942). HCV prevalence among PEH in Santiago was low, with risk factors differing from high-prevalence settings. Structural barriers remain the main obstacle to treatment, underscoring the need for targeted interventions within elimination strategies.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".