Modelling HIV/AIDS epidemic among men who have sex with men in China

A compartmental model with antiviral therapy was proposed to identify the important factors that influence HIV infection among gay men in China and suggest some effective control strategies. We proved that the disease will be eradicated if the reproduction number is less than one. Based on the number of annual reported HIV/AIDS among MSM we used the Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) simulation to estimate the unknown parameters. We estimated a mean reproduction number of 3.88 (95% CI: 3.69-4.07). The estimation results showed that there were a higher transmission rate and a lower diagnose rate among MSM than those for another high-risk population. We compared the current treatment policy and immediate therapy once people are diagnosed with HIV, and numerical studies indicated that immediate antiviral therapy would lead to few HIV new infections conditional upon relatively low infectiousness; otherwise the current treatment policy would result in low HIV new infection. Further, increasing treatment coverage rate may lead to decline in HIV new infections and be beneficial to disease control, depending on the infectiousness of the infected individuals with antiviral therapy. The finding suggested that treatment efficacy (directly affecting infectiousness), behavior changes, and interventions greatly affect HIV new infection; strengthening intensity will contribute to the disease control.