Couple serostatus patterns in sub-Saharan Africa illuminate the relative roles of transmission rates and sexual network characteristics in HIV epidemiology.

ABSTRACT: HIV prevalence has surpassed 30% in some African countries while peaking at less than 1% in others. The extent to which this variation is driven by biological factors influencing the HIV transmission rate or by variation in sexual network characteristics remains widely debated. Here, we leverage couple serostatus patterns to address this question. HIV prevalence is strongly correlated with couple serostatus patterns across the continent; in particular, high prevalence countries tend to have a lower ratio of serodiscordancy to concordant positivity. To investigate the drivers of this continental pattern, we fit an HIV transmission model to Demographic and Health Survey data from 45,041 cohabiting couples in 25 countries. In doing so, we estimated country-specific HIV transmission rates and

SUBMITTER: Bellan SE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5923291 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature