Monitoring Health Inequities and Planning in Virginia: Poverty, Human Immunodeficiency Virus, and Sexually Transmitted Infections

摘要

Monitoring social inequalities in sexual health is important to the effective allocation of resources for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevention by state health departments and other outside planning groups. At the Virginia Department of Health, like most US public health agencies, there is a lack of consistent socioeconomic data, such as individual-level poverty measures, collected through routine disease surveillance. As a result, state epidemiologists are only able to provide a general description of poverty, such as the percentage of people living in poverty while providing HIV/STI rates for the same administrative area.This article has 2 objectives. The first is to quantify and compare HIV/STI incidence across 4 stratum of poverty at the census tract level in Virginia using methods developed by the Public Health Disparities Geocoding Project. Second, for each poverty strata we examine the distribution of HIV-positive and other high-risk populations, identified as priority concerns for HIV prevention planning in Virginia ("priority populations"). This research can help epidemiologists and outside planning groups, who often lack access to geocoded data guide resource allocation for HIV/STI prevention.