Married women pre-marital HIV testing status in Ethiopia: Individual and community level factor analysis.

INTRODUCTION

Marriage between serodiscordant individuals accounts for 65-85% of new infections. Pre-marital Human Immune Virus (HIV) testing opens the door for HIV infection prevention and control. There are no studies that have evaluated the coverage and factors influencing pre-marital HIV testing at the community level in Ethiopia.

METHODS

This study was conducted using 10,008 samples of data extracted from Ethiopian demographic and health surveys (EDHS), 2016. To identify individual and community level factors a multi-level binary logistic regression model was used. Among fitted models, "full" model was taken as the best model. To declare the presence or absence of significant association with pre-marital HIV testing, a -value < 0.05 with confidence interval (CI) was used.

RESULTS

In Ethiopia, 21.4% (95% CI: 20.6, 22.2%) of study participants had pre-marital HIV testing. Age 35-49 years (AOR = 0.25; 95% CI: 0.09, 0.66), educated (AOR = 1.76; 95% CI: 1.17, 2.79), rich (AOR = 1.95; 95% CI: 1.13, 3.55), having media exposure (AOR = 1.54; 95% CI: 1.30, 4.71), and high community level literacy (AOR = 0.38; 95% CI: 0.22, 0.66) were factors significantly associated with pre-marital HIV testing.

CONCLUSION

The low coverage of pre-marital HIV testing in Ethiopia is insufficient to have a significant influence on the HIV/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) epidemic. Information dissemination to create awareness about human rights and public health implications of pre-marital HIV testing áre necessary while it is made mandatory.