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Abstract

HIV, a global threat, has affected more than a hundred million people in the year 2024. The efforts of Integrated Counselling and Testing Centers (ICTCs) and other stakeholders have been instrumental in encouraging health care seeking behavior, reducing HIV transmission rates and reducing the stigma associated with it. The aim of this study was to understand the demographic and behavioral characteristics of clients visiting ICTC and evaluate the trends and patterns of seropositivity. This retrospective cross-sectional study included 38074 clients who visited ICTC from 2016 to 2022. Client details including gender, occupation, education, marital status, resident of rural/urban area, mode of transmission/risk and seropositivity status, was recorded and analysed.

A total of 218 (0.57%) seropositive clients were identified. Seropositivity was higher in married males (p < .05). The number of urban clients was higher than the rural clients, however, no statistically significant difference was found between them (p > .05). A risk behavior pattern revealed that 70.2% heterosexual males and 100% heterosexual females were seropositive. Over the past seven years, intravenous drug abuse decreased from 54.3% to 21% (p < .05). An overall trend of decreasing seropositivity was not found to be statistically significant (p > .05). Despite the two-year COVID-19 pandemic period, the increase in ICTC clients during the seven-year study period is a positive sign. A multipronged approach addressing gender discrimination, illiteracy, unemployment and sex education to enhance efforts to achieve 95-95-95 goal of the UNAIDS HIV/AIDS Programme by the year 2030.

Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0003-2651-0132

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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