Harm reduction prevents HIV, national evidence from Ukraine and Greece shows

Two presentations given at the 20th International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2014), held in Melbourne, Australia, provide significant evidence that harm reduction programmes successfully prevent HIV infection among people who inject drugs (PWID). Other barriers remain, however, to keeping these programmes in place in the long term, and to ensuring that sexual as well as injecting behaviours are positively affected – so as to further decrease HIV incidence and prevalence both among people who inject drugs, and the population as a whole.

Speaking on a July 24 panel entitled People who inject drugs: risks and responses, Olga Varetska of the International HIV/AIDS Alliance Ukraine presented data showing that HIV prevalence and incidence has dropped significantly among the country's drug-using population, in the context of a national harm reduction programme that, among other interventions, offers clean syringes, condoms, and HIV testing. There are approximately 310,000 people who inject drugs in Ukraine, with a mean HIV prevalence of 18%.

Results of the ARISTOTLE programme in Greece, presented by Vana Sypsa from the National Retrovirus Reference Center at the University of Athens’s Medical School, also show that harm reduction programmes work – and quickly and extremely effectively.

ARISTOTLE ran from August 2012 to December 2013, in response to what Sypsa called an "outbreak" of HIV among people who inject drugs: in 2011, countrywide, 266 people who inject drugs were diagnosed with HIV, a figure 16 times higher than in 2010.

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