Abstract
Summary People who inject drugs are an important population to study to reduce transmission of blood-borne illnesses including human immunodeficiency virus and hepatitis. We estimate the human immunodeficiency virus and hepatitis C prevalence among people who inject drugs in Mauritius. Respondent-driven sampling (RDS), which is a widely adopted link tracing sampling design used to collect samples from hard-to-reach human populations, was used to collect this sample. The random-walk approximation underlying many common RDS estimators assumes that each social relationship (edge) in the underlying social network has an equal probability of being traced in the collection of the sample. This assumption does not hold in practice. We show that certain RDS estimators are sensitive to the violation of this assumption. To address this limitation in current methodology, and the effect that it may have on prevalence estimates, we present a new method for improving RDS prevalence estimators using estimated edge inclusion probabilities, and we apply this to data from Mauritius.
Highlights
1.1 Injection Drug Use in MauritiusMauritius is estimated to have one of the highest per capita percentages of people who inject drugs (PWID) of all African countries (Johnston et al, 2013; National AIDS Secretariat, 2014)
Our purpose in this paper is to find the proportion of PWID in Mauritius who are HIVpositive, Hepatitis-C positive, and who are female with a new estimator that improves upon the RDS estimator in Salganik and Heckathorn (2004), by adjusting for the bias induced by without-replacement sampling in both the estimation of average degree and accounting for non-uniform edge inclusion probabilities
We have introduced a new estimator which improves upon existing RDS prevalence estimation by accounting for the unequal edge sampling probabilities that result from the violation of the with-replacement sampling assumption
Summary
Mauritius is estimated to have one of the highest per capita percentages of people who inject drugs (PWID) of all African countries (Johnston et al, 2013; National AIDS Secretariat, 2014). This high rate of injection drug use has seriously impacted public health, as it is the primary mode of HIV transmission within Mauritius, and accounts for 44% of all HIV transmissions in the country (Mau, 2015). In this paper we estimate the HIV and Hepatitis C prevalence, and the proportion of PWID in Mauritius who are female. As the data were collected using RDS, we describe the RDS recruitment process, as well as the accompanying estimation methods and the assumptions that they require to produce valid inference
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