REACH researcher Roberto Abadie recently led a new publication on establishing trust among people who inject drugs when researching HIV and hepatitis C. The paper was published in PLoS ONE in December of 2018 and focuses on how trust forms between researchers and participants. Findings suggest
Memory Manda came to the University of Nebraska in January 2018 as a recipient of the National Institute of Health (NIH) Fogarty grant for HIV Research Training. In Manda's native country of Zambia, the Nebraska Center for Virology researchers have found that those with HIV
Members of the REACH lab published a paper in Substance Use and Misuse in November titled "Injection Partners, HCV, and HIV Status among Rural Persons Who Inject Drugs in Puerto Rico." REACH researchers Patrick Habecker, Roberto Abadie, and Kirk Dombrowski set out to identify network risks associated with
Injection drug users are at exceedingly heightened risk for contracting infectious diseases like Hepatitis C and HIV, and risk behaviors associated with drug use and sexual behavior contribute greatly to the prevalence of HIV and HCV in PWID communities. The injection drug user population in
REACH graduate research assistant Ian Duncan presented at the annual American Society of Criminology conference in November. Duncan's presentation titled "Hepatitis C Serosorting Behaviors: An Urban/Rural Comparison" focused on the comparisons of serosorting behaviors in rural and urban Puerto Rico among injection drug users. Ian Duncan also
Ongoing results of studies concerning the United States War on Drugs uncover how policies have raised the incarceration rates of racial minorities for nonviolent, drug-related crimes, profoundly stigmatized drug users, and redirected resources from drug prevention and treatment to militarizing federal and local law enforcement. Yet,
While injection drug use poses a large risk for the spread of infectious diseases like HIV and HCV, people who use injection drugs (PWID) have developed a variety of methods to prevent such infection in their networks. For instance, one method is "serosorting"—a type of
Substance use of all varieties has seen great demographic shifts throughout the United States in the past century. While attention to drug use, trafficking, and addiction was once centered on urban populations and networks, epidemics like those concerning methamphetamines, heroin, and opioids have increasingly complicated
In Puerto Rico, the urgency of HIV infection is visible in shear numbers: the rate of diagnosis is the fourth highest in all the United States at 33.8 per 100,000 of the population compared to a national average of 19.7. Even more concerning is the
In the epidemiology of infectious diseases, much of researchers' concerns center around how disease spreads or, more optimistically, how an outbreak may be mitigated by other social and biological factors. Researchers with REACH have been innovatively applying the simulation abilities of social network modeling to