Can data on HIV sero-reactivity among blood donors provide an insight into HIV prevalence in the general population?

INTRODUCTION & OBJECTIVES: Surveillance of HIV epidemic serves the important purposes of situation analysis for programme design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. For HIV surveillance among general population, HIV prevalence data from pregnant women attending sentinel sero-surveillance sites, and prevention of parent to child transmission (PPTCT) services as well as data from population based surveys are used. Data on HIV prevalence among voluntary donors can be yet another source of information on the prevalence and progress of HIV infection.

METHODS

HIV prevalence data from 10 PPTCT centers, 58 Government blood banks and 9-13 sentinel sero-surveillance sites during 2004-2006 in West Bengal were analyzed.

RESULTS

During this period, estimated HIV prevalence ranged between 0.40% to 0.86% among the ANC attendees of sentinel sero-surveillance sites, between 0.15-0.18% at PPTCT centers, and between 0.29-0.49% among voluntary blood donors.

CONCLUSION

Data on HIV prevalence among voluntary blood donors can provide a fairly good understanding of trends and patterns of HIV prevalence among the general population specially among young males. For making meaningful inferences from such analysis, standardization in terms of blood collection, testing for HIV infection, reporting and analysis is called for. This is a very cost-effective method of estimating HIV prevalence, and is amenable to detailed analysis of spatial and temporal trends of HIV infection in the general population.