Failure to aid drug users drives HIV spread, says study

LONDON (Reuters) - More than 90 percent of the world's 16 million injecting drug users are offered no help to avoid contracting AIDS, and governments that ignore them risk a spiraling public health crisis, drugs experts said on Monday.

67 people per 10,000 exposures to an infected source make up the estimated HIV/AIDS infections. UNAIDS estimates that around 30 per cent of HIV transmission outside sub-Saharan Africa is driven by unsafe injecting practices. Of the estimated 16 million injecting drug users worldwide, 3 million are thought to be HIV-positive, and drug users are thought to account for 10 percent of all those living with HIV.

Injecting drug use is an increasingly important cause of HIV transmission in many countries around the world. Users can spread the virus in blood by sharing needles with an HIV-infected person, and pass it on by having unprotected sex. The recent study shows a "critical health problem" is growing in places like Russia, China, Malaysia and Thailand, they said, where drug users are a neglected population in the fight against AIDS and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes it. In Russia, for example, around a million injecting drug users are living with HIV and some 65 percent of new HIV infections there are thought to come from injections.

Gerry Stimson, director of the International Harm Reduction Association, accused such states of "playing politics with people's lives" and said millions were at risk as a result. "HIV prevention treatment and care services for injecting drug users are clinically effective, but to exert a population-level effect they need to be delivered to scale," the study wrote . The current level is "not sufficient to prevent, halt or turn around the HIV epidemic among this at-risk population."

Don Des Jarlais of the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York said the poor coverage suggested some authorities should work to bring their policies "in line with scientific evidence." "Long-term sustained efforts to protect the health of individuals who use both licit and illicit drugs might require that policy makers acquire a basic scientific understanding of drug use and addiction," he wrote.