(P49) ASSESSING REPRESENTATIVENESS OF SAMPLED AND INTERVIEWED GONORRHEA INFECTIONS, CALIFORNIA, 2022

Background:
The California Gonorrhea Surveillance System randomly samples gonorrhea infections in California and attempts to interview them for enhanced surveillance. We compared demographic representativeness of sampled gonorrhea infections with non-sampled gonorrhea infections and compared interviewed infections with all non-sampled and non-interviewed infections.

Methods:
Inclusion criteria for random sampling included California residents aged ≥14 (excluding San Francisco County). Age and race/ethnicity were compared using Pearson’s chi-squared test: first, randomly sampled infections to all non-sampled infections, and second, interviewed infections to non-sampled and non-interviewed infections. P<0.05 was considered significant.

Results:
In 2022, there were 73,571 gonorrhea infections in California; 48,395 (65.8%) were eligible; and 4.2% were sampled (2,039). The sampled and non-sampled groups had similar Asian, Hispanic, American Indian/Alaskan Native, and Pacific Islander population distributions. Comparing sampled and non-sampled groups, 16-25- and 26–35-year-old cases were significantly less likely to be sampled compared to other ages. Comparing interviewed (632) with non-sampled and non-interviewed infections (47,763), American Indian/Alaskan Native, Pacific Islander (PI), White populations were underrepresented among interviewed infections, while 16–25-year-olds were significantly less likely and 36-45 were significantly more likely to be interviewed compared to other ages.

Conclusion:
Randomly sampled gonorrhea infections in California were, for the most part, not significantly different from non-sampled gonorrhea infections; similarly, the successfully interviewed subset of this random sample was, for the most part, not significantly different from non-sampled and non-interviewed gonorrhea infections in the state. However, young people and AI/AN and PI populations were under-represented in interviews. Subsequent analyses of California’s enhanced gonococcal surveillance data in combination with other states’ samples will be mostly representative of California’s gonorrhea infections in terms of race/ethnicity and age. Ongoing QA of these random samples in CA, and similar analyses in other jurisdictions will help to characterize the representativeness of sampled and interviewed STIs relative to the overall STI burden.