Abstract:

BACKGROUND:Repeat sexually transmitted infections in DC primarily results from untreated sexual partners. This analysis aims to identify high-risk areas and temporal trends of repeat STIs for PrEP scale-up and STI mitigation in DC. METHODS:We identified repeat infections DC Department of Health STI and HIV data management systems, diagnosed from 2014-2018. The cases were geocoded and aggregated by census tracts. Poisson discrete scan statistic was implemented in SaTScan software to find clusters. Weighted moving average was used to compare temporal trends of repeat STIs. We used chi-square analysis to identify association with demographic variables. RESULTS:We identified 8535 repeat STIs from 2014-2018. Of these, 61.84% were among males, a majority of cases were among Blacks (34.75%) and 47.45% represented gonorrhea cases. The high-risk spatial clusters were identified as those tracts which had relative risk (RR>1; p-value <0.001). We identified one significant radius of risk covering tracts of wards 7 and 8 as well as parts of wards 5 and 6. We spotted positive temporal trends in cluster 1 as well as outside the cluster. We found significant associations of repeat STIs with gender (χ = 317.27, p<0.001), age (χ = 539.26, p<0.001), HIV coinfections (χ = 352.06, p<0.001) and year of diagnoses (χ = 1.5, p<0.01). CONCLUSIONS:Our findings indicate spatial disparities in DC for repeat STIs. This analysis is critical for PrEP planning, STI prevention strategies such as expedited partner therapies as well as condom distribution strategies in DC should prioritize the high-risk spatial cores.