Abstract
Background: Colombia has the fourth highest incidence rate of HIV/AIDS among all Latin American countries and it has been increasing since the 1980s. However, the number of studies that addresses this trend is limited. Here, we employed spatial and temporal trend analyses to study the behaviour of the epidemic in the Colombian territory. Methods: Our sample included 72,994 cases of HIV/AIDS and 21,898 AIDS-related deaths reported to the National Ministry of Health between 2008 and 2016. We employed the joinpoint regression model to analyse the annual HIV/AIDS incidence and AIDS mortality rates. In the spatial analysis, we used univariate autocorrelation techniques and the Kernel density estimator. Results: While the HIV/AIDS incidence had an increasing trend in Colombia, the AIDS mortality rate was stable. HIV/AIDS incidence and AIDS mortality showed a downward trend in the 0–14 age group. An upward trend was observed for HIV/AIDS incidence in people older than 15 years and with the highest trend in the 65 years and above group. AIDS mortality showed an increasing trend among people aged 65 years or older. The comparison between the sexes showed an upward trend of HIV/AIDS incidence in all age groups and AIDS-mortality rates in 65 years and above in men, while in women, the incidence was upward among those aged 45 years and above, and concerning the AIDS-mortality rate in the 45–64 group. The high–high clusters of HIV/AIDS incidence and AIDS mortality were located in the Andean and Caribbean regions. Conclusion: Our study found an upward trend in HIV/AIDS incidence and a stable trend in the AIDS mortality rate in Colombia. The downward trend in HIV/AIDS incidence and AIDS mortality rate in the 0–14 age group reflects the downwards mother-to-child HIV transmission. The upward trend in HIV/AIDS incidence in older women and AIDS mortality in younger women rates, compared with men, may be due to late diagnosis and treatment. The Caribbean and the ‘coffee belt’ regions were the most impacted by the HIV epidemic, most likely due to sexual tourism. Our results provide crucial information that may help Colombian health authorities fight HIV transmission.
Description
Copyright: © 2021 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
Publisher
BMC of Springer Nature
Date of publication
Spring 1-21-2021
Language
english
Persistent identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/10950/4322
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Montana, Jhon Freddy; Oliveira Naiff Ferreira, Glenda Roberta; Figueiredo Cunha, Carlos Leonardo; Rego de Queiroz, Ana Angelica; Andrade Fernandes, Wellington Augusto; Isse Polaro, Sandra Helena; Takase Goncalves, Lucia Hisako; Costa Carrara Couto, Danielle; Gir, Elucir; Reis, Renata Karina; Sorensen, William; and Pinheiro Botelho, Elia, "The HIV epidemic in Colombia: spatial and temporal trends analysis" (2021). Health and Kinesiology Faculty Publications and Presentations. Paper 36.
http://hdl.handle.net/10950/4322