Some epidemiological aspects of HIV AIDS in Egypt

Abstract EN

Background: The prevalence of HIV / AIDS in Egypt is around 0.03 % among the general population, and ranges from 0.05 % to 0.56 % among people with high-risk behaviors.

The studies determining the association between behavioral and lifestyle factors and the risk of HIV/AIDS in Egypt are lacking.

Objectives: This study aimed to describe the general profile of some Egyptian HIV/AIDS cases and to investigate the effect of some sociodemographic, behavioral and lifestyle factors on the risk of HIV/AIDS.

Subjects and Methods: The study recruited 83 HIV / AIDS cases and 166 healthy controls from the central laboratories of Egyptian ministry of health and population during the period from the first of July through December 2004.

The cases were ELISA and Western blot tests positive, while the controls were ELISA test negative.

Univariate logistic regression analysis was used to assess the association between HIV/AIDS and some sociodemographic, behavioral and lifestyle risk factors.

Results: The studied HIV/AIDS cases were relatively young with a mean age of 31 years.

Compared with controls, the cases were more urban and unmarried, and more often smokers with statistically significant differences.

A strong and significant positive association was found between the risk of HIV/AIDS and extramarital sexual relation, sharing needles, addiction and history of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

The highest odds ratio (OR) was for extramarital sexual relation (OR= 430; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 60.0-8758.4), with an estimated attributable fraction among the exposed cases was 99.7 %.

To some extent, the risk was also high among unmarried subjects and those living in urban area.

On the other hand, the high educational level was found to have a protective effect on the risk of HIV/AIDS, although insignificant (OR = 0.55 ; 95 % CI = 0.18-1.81).

Conclusion: This study suggests that extramarital sexual relation, sharing needles, addiction and STDs are important factors influencing the risk of HIV/AIDS among our studied subjects.

However, small sample size and inability to do adjustment analyses limit interpretation of these findings.

Further studies with large sample size are needed to overcome these limitations.

Key words: behavioral factors, case-control study, epidemiology, HIV/AIDS.