Harm reduction needed to cut drug-user AIDS risk

Barely a twentieth of the estimated $3.2 billion needed is put into preventing drug users spreading the AIDS virus, experts said on Monday, and the shortfall is fuelling HIV epidemics in parts of Europe and Asia.

In a report on the use of "harm reduction" measures like clean needle exchanges and safer drug substitutes, the experts found that in countries which fail to take prevention steps, drug-related HIV infection accounts for the vast majority of new cases.

The proportion of new HIV cases linked to injecting drug use is 90 percent in Bangladesh, 66 percent in Russia and 50 percent in Indonesia, the report said; yet only around three U.S. cents a day is spent on trying to halt drug-related spread of the virus in low- and middle-income countries.

"We have known now for well over two decades that HIV is preventable -- it is untenable that today in some 100 (poorer) countries nearly all people who inject drugs have absolutely no access to clean needles or methadone," said Professor Gerry Stimson, a co-author of the report and the director of the International Harm Reduction Association (IHRA).

About 33.4 million people worldwide are infected with the AIDS virus. Since AIDS emerged in the 1980s, almost 60 million people have been infected and 25 million have died.

Drug users can spread the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS by sharing needles with an HIV-infected person, or pass it on by having unprotected sex.

Harm reduction measures for drug users -- like providing clean needles, condoms and the drug substitute methadone -- were introduced some 25 years ago in countries such as Australia and in European cities like Rotterdam and Liverpool, where AIDS spreading among addicts was a major problem.

Similar policies have since been adopted by public health authorities in many European and other rich nations and, along with safe sex campaigns, are considered a major factor in the relatively low rates of HIV in those places.