Hepatitis B validity of drug users' self-report

Although drug users' self-report has provided data for much of the publishe d literature about drug use, Little is known about self-report validity whe n participants are asked about diseases that are associated with drug abuse , such as hepatitis. Injecting drug users and crack cocaine smokers (N = 65 9) were recruited in Anchorage, Alaska, and asked whether they had been dia gnosed previously with hepatitis B. These self-report data were compared to various hepatitis B and C seromarkers as measures of validity of self-repo rt expressed as sensitivity and specificity. Results indicate that although test-retest reliability for self-report is high (.905) and specificity is high (96.06% for hepatitis C virus, or HCV), sensitivity is low (23.74% for HCV). Thus, because of its low sensitivity, self-report of hepatitis shoul d be used only as a prevalence estimate lower bound. More than half of the drug users who had contracted hepatitis had never been told that they were infected.