Vancouver HIV/AIDS
Care Co-ordinating Committee
Public Sections
Documents: Environment Report 1999-2002
This is a companion document to the Strategic Plan and a work in progress; this version March 31, 2000
RESEARCH
Much of the research data presented in this document has been provided by the Community Health Resource Project (CHRP). CHRP is an ongoing research project investigating the economic costs and related social issues of HIV and AIDS in Vancouver. The CHRP team is located at the Department of Health Care and Epidemiology, University of British Columbia, and receives funding from Health Canada and the British Columbia Ministry of Health.
CHRP has compiled, with the participation of 654 persons, a comprehensive database of the health care and community resources used by those persons who are living with HIV/AIDS in Vancouver. All CHRP findings in this document are from the baseline interview of the full cohort.
The CHRP information is generally divided into two categories: participants who indicated injection drug use (IDU) as a possible route of infection and those participants who did not (non-IDU). Many tables simply compare IDUs and non-IDUs. The IDU category includes both men and women. CHRP found that most women in the sample reported injection drug use as a possible route of transmission. CHRP’s findings for female IDUs are, in many aspects, the same as (or not significantly different from) those for male IDUs. Transgender IDUs form a small percentage of the CHRP population. For this reason, CHRP has kept the IDU category as an aggregate of men, women and transgendered persons. This does not mean that the analysis of women has been ignored. Rather, it simply reflects that, for the analyses presented here, there is not a statistically significant difference between male IDUs and female IDUs.
When information is presented with the categories of IDU and MSM (men who have sex with men), those categories have been kept mutually exclusive. Male participants who reported both having sex with men and injecting drugs as possible routes of infection are not included in either of the two groups. If someone reports a particular route of infection (e.g., injection drug use), it does not necessarily mean that the person is still engaging in this risk behaviour. It also does not mean that the person did not engage in other risk behaviours at the time they believed they became infected (e.g., MSM who shared needles might only report IDU as a possible route of infection).
The Committee would also like to acknowledge the research support of the following organizations: the Vancouver Multiple Diagnosis Committee, AIDS Vancouver, BC Persons With AIDS Society, the Vancouver/Richmond Health Board and the St. James Community Service Society.
