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Copyright of Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health is the property of Canadian Periodical for Community Studies Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Migrants are at an increased risk of HIV acquisition. We aimed to use phylogenetics to characterize transmission clusters among newly-diagnosed asylum seekers and to understand the role of networks in local HIV transmission. Retrospective chart reviews of asylum seekers linked to HIV care between 1 June 2017 and 31 December 2018 at the McGill University Health Centre and the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal were performed. HIV-1 partial pol sequences were analyzed among study participants and individuals in the provincial genotyping database. Trees were reconstructed using MEGA10 neighbor-joining analysis. Clustering of linked viral sequences was based on a strong bootstrap support (>97%) and a short genetic distance (<0.01). Overall, 10,645 provincial sequences and 105 asylum seekers were included. A total of 13/105 participant sequences (12%; n = 7 males) formed part of eight clusters. Four clusters (two to three people) included only study participants (n = 9) and four clusters (two to three people) included four study participants clustered with six individuals from the provincial genotyping database. Six (75%) clusters were HIV subtype B. We identified the presence of HIV-1 phylogenetic clusters among asylum seekers and at a population-level. Our findings highlight the complementary role of cohort data and population-level genotypic surveillance to better characterize transmission clusters in Quebec. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]