People who inject drugs are at risk of various infectious diseases. Despite such a risk, evidence is limited which studied the utilization of screening services for common infectious diseases among people who inject drugs in Tanzania. We conducted a baseline cross-sectional study as part of a prospective cohort study of people who inject drugs. We included participants comprising of new enrollees of the integrated methadone-assisted treatment program and those who were selected from the communities but not enrolled in the program.
We interviewed new enrollees preceding their enrollment and receipt of services from the program. We analyzed the data descriptively and used multiple logistic regressions to identify the factors associated with ever being screened for infectious diseases. Of participants, Of sexually active participants, Of all participants, however, only They were more likely to have ever been screened for HIV infection if they had education levels above primary education adjusted odds ratio [AOR]: 2.
People who inject drugs practice high-risk behaviors but their utilization of screening services for infectious diseases is poor in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It is crucial to increase the coverage of screening services for them and strengthen the counseling of safer sexual practices. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. People who inject drugs are at risk of various infectious diseases [ 1 — 4 ]. They engage in high-risk injecting and sexual behaviors that predispose them to HIV infection, hepatitis, and other sexually transmitted infections STIs [ 5 — 8 ].
Once they are infected with one infectious disease, they may be at an increased risk of another or progress the pathogenesis of another. For example, HIV-positive people who inject drugs are at a high risk of tuberculosis [ 9 , 10 ]. Screening interventions can mitigate the transmissions of these infectious diseases. If individuals know their infection statuses, they may engage in safer sexual [ 15 ] and injecting behaviors [ 16 ].
