High risk injecting behaviour among injectors from Glasgow: cross sectional community wide surveys 1990-1999

Abstract

During 1990–1994 and 1999, voluntary, anonymous, cross sectional surveys of Glasgow's injectors were performed to determine their prevalence of HIV, HCV and associated risk behaviours.3 In the 1990–1994 sweeps of the survey, people were eligible for participation if they had injected drugs in the two months before interview; in 1999 respondents were eligible if they had ever injected since January 1990. A multi-site, community wide, sampling strategy—with respondents drawn from both “in treatment” and “out of treatment” settings—was adopted to minimise selection bias. The questionnaire administered by trained interviewers was standardised across survey years. An assessment was made of changes in needle/syringe sharing over successive cross sectional surveys, using multifactorial logistic regression analyses. Data were analysed using S-PLUS software.