Abstract
Intravenous drug use and tattooing remain one of the major routes of HIV/AIDS transmission among prisoners. We formulate and analyze a deterministic model for the role of intravenous drug use in HIV/AIDS transmission among women prisoners. With the aid of the Centre Manifold theory, the endemic equilibrium is shown to be locally asymptotically stable when the corresponding reproduction number is greater than unity. Analysis of the reproduction number and numerical simulations suggest that an increase in intravenous drug use among women prisoners as they fail to cope with prison settings fuels the HIV/AIDS epidemic in women prisoners. Failure to control HIV/AIDS among female prisoners may be a time bomb to their communities upon their release. Thus, it may be best to consider free needle/syringe exchange and drug substitution treatment programmes in women prisons as well as considering open prison systems for less serious crimes.
Highlights
The imprisonment of large numbers of drug addicts has the potential to create environments within which social networks that enhance the transmission of infectious diseases form [1,2,3,4,5,6]
A mathematical model has been presented in attempt to understand the transmission dynamics of HIV/AIDS among female prisoners with particular reference to female prisoners in Zimbabwe
Drug use in female prisons is two way: (i) sharing of unsterile needles/syringes enhances the transmission of HIV and (ii) flashing blood that is drawing blood from someone who has injected herself with a drug and inject the blood into herself on its own exposes the injector to the HIV infection
Summary
The imprisonment of large numbers of drug addicts has the potential to create environments within which social networks that enhance the transmission of infectious diseases form [1,2,3,4,5,6]. The present study differs from the previous work [23] in that here we are dealing with HIV/AIDS whose stages of disease progression are ISRN Computational Biology different from those of HCV. This results in the two models studied having different forces of infection. Disclosure is not the subject of this study, HIV status disclosure plays a significant role in the control of the epidemic This is probably the first model that attempts to look into transmission dynamics of HIV/AIDS among female prisoners.
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