The British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BCCfE) has released new research that finds previously incarcerated women with HIV are three times more likely to have poor adherence to combination anti-retroviral therapy than HIV positive women who have not been incarcerated.
Simon Fraser University Health Sciences professor and principal investigator of the study at the BCCfE, Angela Kaida, presented the findings at the 21st International AIDS conference in Durban, South Africa.
The research comes from a survey conducted by Canadian HIV Women’s Sexual & Reproductive Health Cohort Study (CHIWOS), Canada’s largest multi-site community-based cohort study, with 1,425 women living with HIV enrolled in the provinces of British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec.
Key findings from the study include that 30 per cent of study participants had been incarcerated with six per cent having been incarcerated in the past year. Recently incarcerated women with HIV were three times as likely to be lower income and live in unstable housing than women who had never been incarcerated.
“This research shows the urgent need for programming that provides women with the necessary health and social supports following incarceration,” says Hogg.
Access and adherence to combination antiretroviral therapy, the standard for HIV treatment, is critical for both individual health and HIV prevention efforts.