Drug users forgotten in HIV/AIDS battle

Failure to tackle HIV/ AIDS among drug users is hampering the global battle against the disease, the United Nations agency that coordinates the world body's fight against the disease warned Monday.

To be effective, programmes targeting the HIV virus, which precedes AIDS, need to reach around 80 percent of people who inject drugs, said
UNAIDS.

However, only eight percent of the estimated 13 million intravenous drug users worldwide, around half of whom live in Asia, have access to any kind of HIV prevention or treatment programme
The shortfall has deadly consequences, because fighting the virus among drug users is a key to stemming its spread in the wider population, said UNAIDS.

"About 10 percent of all new HIV infections worldwide are attributable to injecting drug use. If you exclude Africa, that figure rises to 30 percent," Prasada Rao, UNAIDS' regional director for Asia and the Pacific, told a conference in Warsaw.

"Evidence shows that HIV prevention programmes are particularly effective among people who inject drugs, but they are regularly denied access to information and services," he said.

UNAIDS also said that access to antiretroviral therapy, which is used to keep the disease under control in infected individuals, was "unacceptably low" among injecting drug users.

It blamed "lack of information, exclusion and widespread stigma and discrimination."

Key planks of programmes for drug users include giving them ready access to clean syringes -- reused needles are a key source of infection -- and providing less harmful substitutes, such as methadone for heroin, to help people break their drug habit under supervision.

Worldwide, HIV is predominantly spread by heterosexual sex.

Injecting drug use, however, is a major mode of HIV transmission in Southeast Asia, and the former communist bloc countries of Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

In addition, drug use is emerging as a new source of HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, UNAIDS noted.

HIV programmes for injecting drug users make a difference, said the agency, citing the example of Portugal, which scaled up programmes for drug users in 2001.

Four years later, HIV diagnoses among injecting drug users had been cut by almost a third, said UNAIDS.

"The allocation of financial resources must be used in more strategic and innovative ways to deliver more effective prevention programmes to people most at risk of HIV infection," said Rao.

Around 39.5 million people were living with HIV or AIDS at the end of last year, according to UN figures.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains by far the worst-affected region, being home to two-thirds of all people living with HIV.