MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -
Injecting drug users are denied HIV
drugs in some places in the world, making it much more
difficult to combat the epidemic, experts told a conference on
Tuesday.

Drug users have spouses, children and often multiple sex
partners, making them a major vector of HIV transmission. In
Thailand, they are randomly rounded up, publicly humiliated and
jailed, said Paisan Suwannawong of the non-government Thai AIDS
Treatment Action Group.

“Police have to meet their quotas so they arrest IDUs
(injecting drug users) and throw them behind bars. They are
forced into cold turkey without any kind of help. Some are even
randomly killed and these cases are not investigated,”
Suwannawong said in an interview after delivering a speech at
the international AIDS conference in Mexico City.

“They are stigmatized and not accepted as humans. Police
shave their heads and make them run around their villages to
humiliate them. They are not given HIV drugs because people
think they can't adhere to treatment.”

“But IDUs are the only high-risk group in Thailand
experiencing no reduction in HIV prevalence in 20 years and
they make up 25 percent of all new infections … they must be
given HIV drugs,” said Suwannawong.

A study published on Sunday in the Journal of the American
Medical Association challenged the notion that drug users do
not stick to HIV treatments.

Suwannawong and other panelists called for more humane
treatment of drug users, recommending strategies such as clean
needle exchange programs.

But many governments fear that needle exchange programs
condone drug use and refuse to implement them. The U.S. federal
government opposes such programs, although some U.S. cities
have legalized them.

“With drug users, it's the stigma, the criminalization and
legal policies that inhibit the implementation of these
programs … Criminalization and law enforcement have taken
over harm reduction,” Adeeba Kamarulzaman, head professor of
infectious diseases at the University of Malaya in Malaysia,
told the conference.

Injecting drug users make up 30 percent of all new
infections outside sub-Saharan Africa and 89 percent of all new
cases in Asia.

In the United States, between 25 and 33 percent of
injecting drug users are infected with HIV.

But in Australia, where clean needle exchange is widely
promoted, only 3 percent to 6 percent of injecting drug users
are HIV positive, said Kamarulzaman, who also heads the
Malaysian AIDS Council.

Needle exchange programs exist in 77 countries but in China
and Malaysia, for example, anti-narcotics police still conduct
raids on needle-exchange sites, which only drive drug users
further underground, Kamarulzaman said.

(Editing by Alan Elsner) >