Description of Session
Sexual transmission of HIV is the most common cause of HIV infection in Mozambique, therefore the ability to identify and offer HIV counseling and testing (HIVCT) to sex partners (SP) of individuals living with HIV is of utmost importance. This task has been extremely complex using paper-based tools, given that networks of SP lead to a complex cascade of various partners. To better organize and visualize these complex networks, the use of a digital platform, PISAUDE, which is an application initially designed to capture data on people offered HIVCT, has matured into a database that can look at these complex networks of SP to better understand exposures and risks among these networks. The first found case of HIV is an index case, and each SP of the IC is also inquired about their SP, and so on, in a growing cascade. Each subsequent partner is visualized as a ‘layer’ that can then inform about subsequent SP. The aim of this session is to show that a digital platform is a fast, real-time and easy to use tool for identify and creating sexual links between individuals who may otherwise not have appeared to know each other. For the lay counselor that is building the coordinates of the network of sex partners of an IC to whom HIV CT can be offered, this tool is very helpful, regardless of the complex algorithms running in the background. The use of PISAUDE enabled the identification at least 5 layers within partner networks since 2017: the first layer is the SP of the IC, i.e., the 20656 individuals related to 21085 IC; those, in turn, had 684 SP (layer 2); the third layer had 43 SP, the fourth had 4, and the fifth layer had 1. The HIV positivity among SP was 18%.
