Abstract

Human immunodeficiency virus self-testing (HIVST) is an innovative and effective strategy important to the expansion of HIV testing coverage. Several innovative implementations of HIVST have been developed and piloted among some HIV high-risk populations like men who have sex with men (MSM) to meet the global testing target. One innovative strategy is the secondary distribution of HIVST, in which individuals (defined as indexes) were given multiple testing kits for both self-use (i.e.self-testing) and distribution to other people in their MSM social network (defined as alters). Studies about secondary HIVST distribution have mainly concentrated on developing new intervention approaches to further increase the effectiveness of this relatively new strategy from the perspective of traditional public health discipline. There are many points of HIVST secondary distribution in which mathematical modelling can play an important role. In this study, we considered secondary HIVST kits distribution in a resource-constrained situation and proposed two data-driven integer linear programming models to maximize the overall economic benefits of secondary HIVST kits distribution based on our present implementation data from Chinese MSM. The objective function took expansion of normal alters and detection of positive and newly-tested ‘alters’ into account. Based on solutions from solvers, we developed greedy algorithms to find final solutions for our linear programming models. Results showed that our proposed data-driven approach could improve the total health economic benefit of HIVST secondary distribution.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Data science approaches to infectious disease surveillance’.

Highlights

  • Men who have sex with men (MSM) are currently the most vulnerable community populations affected by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)

  • Secondary HIV self-testing (HIVST) kits distribution has proven to be an effective strategy in HIV prevention and should be upscaled in more countries [10,12]

  • This study evaluated two data-driven integer programming models adopted in determining the optimal resource allocation for initial test kits dispatch in secondary HIVST distribution among Chinese MSM

Read more

Summary

Introduction

Men who have sex with men (MSM) are currently the most vulnerable community populations affected by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). HIV status unawareness is the main factor leading to the current HIV epidemic among MSM. Providing routine testing to enable infected individuals to know their HIV-positive status and facilitating their treatment initiation contributes significantly to HIV prevention interventions [2]. Over 40% of Chinese MSM have never been tested [3], and over 30% of HIV-infected individuals remain unaware of their serostatus [4]. HIVST is an optimal strategy to address the persisting concerns about HIV testing like stigma and the lack of trust towards medical institutions [7] and to reach marginalized populations at high risk of infection

Objectives
Results
Conclusion
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call