Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Apr 22, 2023
Date Accepted: Jul 21, 2024
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
An exploration of the public health implications of the network scale-up method
ABSTRACT
Background:
The network scale-up method (NSUM) was recommended by the United Nations Programme on Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome and the World Health Organization to estimate the sizes of the populations at high risk of HIV infection in 2010; however, we found that the NSUM also revealed underlying population characteristics of female sex workers (FSWs) in addition to being used to estimate the size of the FSWs population.
Objective:
We aimed to conduct a further exploration of the public health implications of the NSUM.
Methods:
An NSUM survey was conducted to estimate the size population of injecting drug users (IDUs) in the urban district of Taiyuan, China in 2021.
Results:
The estimated size of the IDU population in Taiyuan was 1,244 (95% CI: 1,011-1,477), corresponding to 0.044% (95% CI: 0.036%-0.052%) of the adult population aged 15-64 years. The estimated popularity ratio of the IDU population was 0.535 (95% CI: 0.512-0.558), and the estimated information transmission rate was 0.879 (95% CI: 0.867-0.892).
Conclusions:
The NSUM revealed that the IDU population have smaller sized personal social networks while concealing their high-risk behaviours, and these underlying population characteristics are extremely useful for planning appropriate service delivery approaches with the fewest barriers for high-risk populations to access HIV prevention services.
Citation
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