Background: AIDS is one of the most important problems of public health in our setting. The surveillance of HIV infection in sentinel population is an important alternative to the use of the AIDS cases registries, to obtain a dynamic and updated information about HIV/AIDS epidemic. The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence of HIV infection among the patients from 5 sentinel hospitals in Catalonia, Spain.
Patients and methods: Unlinked anonymous screening of serum from patients aged 15-49 from 5 sentinel hospitals in Catalonia, Spain. Samples were broken by age, sex, in-patients or out-patients and clinical specialities related to HIV/AIDS or not related. Samples were analyzed in pools of five and were tested by the OMS strategy II, for the epidemiological surveillance purposes.
Results: HIV testing was developed in 9,524 patients, with a prevalence of 1.6% (153 samples). The overall prevalence in men was twice that of women (2.3% vs. 1.1%). Ages between 25 to 34 had the higher prevalence (3.1%). Clinical specialities related with HIV/AIDS had a prevalence twice that of non related (2.3% vs. 1.2%).
Conclusions: The HIV prevalence found in this population is the highest compared to similar studies performed in other western european countries. Our data confirm the pattern of HIV infection for age and sex observed in other studies in Catalonia, Spain. This is the first study of sentinel surveillance in sentinel hospitals in Spain and give us the base line which will serve as a reference to assess the evolution of HIV infection in further studies in sentinel hospital populations in Catalonia.