AIDS 2010: “Honoring Life: Constructing the most effective HIV prevention among people injecting by adding overdose prevention work"

AIDS 2010: International Harm Reduction Development Programme Satellite and Skills-building Sessions

14:30-18:00, Mini Room 9

Resources for HIV prevention often motivate work with people who inject drugs. Overdose prevention and response efforts address a major cause of sickness and death among drug users, while also improving HIV prevention efforts. Overdose programming empowers participants by giving them tools to combat overdose. Naloxone (aka Narcan) is a pure antidote to opiate intoxication with 45 years of proven efficacy in medical settings. This workshop will teach basic techniques of preventing and recognizing overdose and will train participants how to teach opiate users and their community to respond effectively with naloxone. It will also examine best practices of integrating overdose response into the work of harm reduction and AIDS service organizations. Finally, we will discuss how addressing this major cause of death can have an impact on increasing the effectiveness of HIV programming. The workshop will be conducted in English with breakout groups in Russian.