Temporal Trends in HIV Incidence Among Pregnant Women Attending Antenatal Care Clinics between 1995 and 2003 in Addis Ababa
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Date
2005-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
HIV infection is routinely diagnosed by various immunoassays that detect the presence of anti-
HIV antibodies. But these methods do not distinguish recent from established infections. The
previously devised method called Ig G-capture BED-EIA (Subtype B, E, D, Enzyme Immuno
Assay) is used to distinguish new from established infection based on standardized optical
density values, which is a measure of antibody titer in the serum using cross-sectional specimen.
The objective of this study was to identify recent HIV-1 infection using STARHS assay and
estimate HIV-1 incidence among pregnant women attending antenatal care clinics in Addis
Ababa and to compare the performance of 'in -house' incidence assay kit with commercial assay
using 1078 cross-sectional samples collected from pregnant women attending Antenatal Care
Clinics (ANC) based on Standardized Optical Density (OD-n) values. Larger percentage of recent
infection was observed among women attending the inner city health centers as compared to the
outer city health centers and among women aged 1 5 - 1 9 years. A decline in HIV incidence was
observed in recent years among women of young age groups attending the inner city health
centers. Significant correlation was observed between the two assays. There were 84 common
samples which had an OD-n value of less than 0.8 and 954 samples with standardized optical
density of greater or equal to 0.8 when tested by both commercial and house -made kits. But forty
samples (3.7%) had discrepant results. An agreement was also observed between the OD-n values
of the two assays, with a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.76.
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Biology