Modeling the Burden of Extreme Weather Events in a Large Network of International HIV Care Cohorts.

Extreme weather events (EWEs) continue to threaten the health and well-being of populations across the globe. However, risk from drought and floods is not evenly distributed spatially nor are all populations equally at risk for poor health outcomes. Globally, people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHIV) face a particular set of challenges with EWE exposure including increased susceptibility to disease progression from care disruptions and medication adherence, and general population concentration in areas where rainfall is both highly variable and key to economic well-being. To mitigate the impacts of EWE exposure on PLHIV, it is necessary to understand the historical EWE exposure patterns at HIV care clinics. In this paper, we link open-source measures of drought and flood events to clinic locations from the International epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA) network, a longitudinal study of over 2 million people living with and at risk for HIV in 44 different countries around the globe enrolling in HIV care from 2006 to present. Using generalized additive models fit to clinic-level drought and flood exposures, we show how exposures vary across and within countries, model each clinic's probability of exposure to a drought or flood to identify high-risk areas, and describe how this historical exposure record could ultimately be used to identify at-risk populations for a wide variety of study designs. While EWEs occurred at HIV care clinics around the globe, we found that clinic locations in Southern Africa are particularly vulnerable to flood and drought events as compared to other IeDEA clinic regions and locations.Extreme weather events (EWEs) threaten human health and well‐being through environmental, economic, social and health pathways such as damaging crops and livestock, destroying infrastructure, displacing populations, and creating conditions for increased transmission of diseases. Some populations, like people living with HIV (PLHIV), are particularly vulnerable to EWEs because of additional health risks and location (The global burden of HIV is concentrated in areas most effected by EWEs). To understand how EWEs impact HIV care provision and health outcomes, researchers need large cohort studies matched with long histories of EWE exposure. In this paper, we combine seasonal measures of drought and flood to establish a historical exposure record from 1981 to present for 777 HIV clinic locations in the International epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA). We use gridded precipitation data from 1981 to 2023 to determine droughts that occur during wet months and archive‐based flood data from 2006 to 2023 to determine flood exposures for clinics and patients. We model these exposures to identify clinic locations at higher risk for flood, drought, and multi‐hazard risk. The approaches used in this study provide a guide for future researchers and identify geographic locations for place‐specific research designs to examine the effects of EWE exposures on HIV health outcomes.