Minimising harm from hepatitis C virus needs better strategies

doi:10.1136/bmj.321.7265.899

BMJ 2000;321:899 ( 7 October )

Letters

Minimising harm from hepatitis C virus needs better strategies

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ Hepatitis C virus and HIV are both blood borne, and infection may occur in injecting drug users, transmitted by sharingcontaminated needles and syringes. Despite extensive harm reductionprogrammes in Australia, hepatitis C virus continues to spreadamong injecting drug users, but HIV does not, partly because theprevalence of hepatitis C virus has been high among injectingdrug users in Australia since at least 1971, whereas that of HIV,present only from around 1982, has remained low.¹

Hepatitis C virus has a higher average transmission efficiency than HIV.² It may be transmitted between injecting drugusers on equipment other than needles and syringes.³ Injectingdrug users in Australia commonly share other equipment $---$ for example,swabs, spoons, filters, water, andtourniquets.

We studied used injecting equipment from 10 injecting settings for the presence of hepatitis C virus RNA, with one to fourinjecting drug users at each setting, at least one . . . [Full text of this article]

CiteULike

Complore

Connotea

Del.icio.us Add to Digg

Digg

StumbleUpon Add to Technorati

Technorati What's this?

Relevant Article

Infection with HIV and hepatitis C virus among injecting drug users in a prevention setting: retrospective cohort study: Ingrid van Beek, Robyn Dwyer, Gregory J Dore, Kehui Luo, and John M Kaldor
BMJ 1998 317: 433-437. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]