Abstract
Men who have sex with men (MSM) make up the majority of new human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) diagnoses among young people in China. Understanding HIV transmission dynamics among the MSM population is, therefore, crucial for the control and prevention of HIV infections, especially for some newly reported genotypes of HIV. This study presents a metapopulation model considering the impact of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to investigate the geographical spread of a hypothetically new genotype of HIV among MSM in Guangdong, China. We use multiple data sources to construct this model to characterize the behavioural dynamics underlying the spread of HIV within and between 21 prefecture-level cities (i.e. Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Foshan, etc.) in Guangdong province: the online social network via a gay social networking app, the offline human mobility network via the Baidu mobility website, and self-reported sexual behaviours among MSM. Results show that PrEP initiation exponentially delays the occurrence of the virus for the rest of the cities transmitted from the initial outbreak city; hubs on the movement network, such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Foshan are at a higher risk of ‘earliest’ exposure to the new HIV genotype; most cities acquire the virus directly from the initial outbreak city while others acquire the virus from cities that are not initial outbreak locations and have relatively high betweenness centralities, such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Shantou. This study provides insights in predicting the geographical spread of a new genotype of HIV among an MSM population from different regions and assessing the importance of prefecture-level cities in the control and prevention of HIV in Guangdong province.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Data science approach to infectious disease surveillance’.
Highlights
Despite substantial progress in tackling the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic, HIV continues to pose public health threats in China [1,2]
To investigate transmission patterns of a new HIV genotype within and between cities, we propose Meta-Spudtr, a metapopulation model where the whole men who have sex with men (MSM) population in Guangdong is divided by a set of subpopulations connected by moving individuals
To quantitatively explain the impact of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and the dynamics underlying the geographical spread of HIV, we provide a simpler framework to capture the dynamics in equation (3.3)
Summary
Despite substantial progress in tackling the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic, HIV continues to pose public health threats in China [1,2]. To investigate the geographical spread of a new HIV genotype among MSM, we construct a movement probabilistic network to infer the MSM movement patterns between cities in Guangdong, one of the major provinces with a high HIV incidence among MSM in China [20] Based on this network, we propose a metapopulation model, considering the impact of PrEP and parameterized with sexual behaviour data among MSM in Guangdong, to mimic the HIV transmission patterns between and within cities. This study aims to predict the geographical spread of a new genotype of HIV among MSM populations from different cities, and to assess the importance of each city in the control and prevention of HIV infections through simulations considering the impact of PrEP. In this paper we used inter-city geographical spread in Guangdong province to illustrate the model building process
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