One step forward and two steps back

I spent 15 years as the Research Director for a community-based public health agency in Massachusetts. We offered substance abuse treatment and mental health services for people at risk for HIV; broader community-based HIV prevention and counseling and testing; housing services for people with HIV; and clinical case management. All of that is about saving the lives of individuals, and also preventing HIV transmission and protecting public health. In principle, if we do all that well and work at it hard enough, we can stop the epidemic.We were making progress. The number of new infections kept declining. The prevalence of HIV among injection drug users fell substantially, to the point where a symposium I attended a couple of years ago featured arguments that HIV transmission among injection drug users in Massachusetts was no longer a significant problem.No longer is this true. As the linked article in the Puffington Host informs us, the presenters at the symposium might have been a bit too complacent but they weren ' t crazy:from 2012 to 2014, an average of just 41 cases of HIV linked to injection drug use were diagnosed per year in the entire state of Massachusetts. And now? That many cases in two cities alone, Lowell (where we had an office) and nearby Lawrence (where we did extensive outreach). The proximate cause is of course the opioid epidemic, and particularly fentanyl, which is shorter acting than heroin, therefore injected more frequently, thereby increasing the ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs