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Census Tract Poverty and Racial Disparities in HIV Rates in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, 2009–2014

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Abstract

Previous work has documented associations between poverty and HIV. Understanding of these relationships at local levels could help target prevention efforts; however, HIV surveillance systems do not capture individual-level poverty measures. We utilized the Public Health Disparities Geocoding Project methods to examine HIV rates by census tract poverty. HIV rates and rate ratios were computed by census tract poverty (< 5.0, 5.0–9.9, 10.0–19.9, > 20.0% of individual below the federal poverty level) for all races and stratified by Black and White race using Poisson regression. We observed higher HIV rates in the highest poverty gradient compared to the lowest poverty gradient for all races combined and among White cases. After adjustment, HIV rates were similar across poverty gradients for all comparisons. Our findings suggest that the association between poverty and HIV may differ by subpopulation, while demonstrating the potential for HIV prevention targeting residents of high poverty areas.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Maternal and Child Health Program, Division of Public Health, Wisconsin Department of Health Services, 1 W. Wilson St., Madison, WI, 53703, USA

    Crystal Gibson

  2. Public Health Madison and Dane County, 210 MLK Jr. Blvd, Rm. 507, Madison, WI, 53703, USA

    Crystal Gibson

  3. AIDS/HIV Program, Division of Public Health, Wisconsin Department of Health Services, 1 W. Wilson St., Madison, WI, 53703, USA

    Katarina Grande, Casey Schumann & Mari Gasiorowicz

Authors
  1. Crystal Gibson
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  2. Katarina Grande
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Correspondence to Crystal Gibson.

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All the authors declare that they have no confict of intereset.

Research Involving Human Participants

This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors. The data used were secondary data collected as part of a mandatory reporting system for public health surveillance.

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Gibson, C., Grande, K., Schumann, C. et al. Census Tract Poverty and Racial Disparities in HIV Rates in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, 2009–2014. AIDS Behav 22, 2994–3002 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-018-2064-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-018-2064-y

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