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Reducing the AIDS Risk for Injection Drug Users: 6 Key Elements

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  1. Early Intervention: It is absolutely vital that there should be early implementation of prevention initiatives, while HIV prevalence is still low.
  2. Comprehensive Package: There must be a comprehensive package of measures to prevent HIV spread among injectors. It is important that local communities - including the drug user community - are mobilized and participate fully for such measures to work. No single element of this package will be effective if practised on its own. But by far the most important element is to provide sterile injecting equipment to injectors.
  3. Outreach and Peer Education: The most effective way to reach injection drug users is through outreach work and peer education. Outreach workers are trained people from outside the community of injectors - though they may themselves be former injectors. Peer educators are existing drug injectors who have been trained to work with their community.
  4. Supportive Environment: This means reducing poverty and creating opportunities for education and employment. This also means continuing to do everything possible to educate and inform people - especially youth - about drugs, an about their implications for health and social well-being, in language that can readily be understood.
  5. Reduction of Demand: An important parallel strategy is to reduce the demand for drugs. The goal must be to stop young people from starting to take drugs in the first place - as well as encouraging existing users of all ages to stop, by participating in treatment programmes.
  6. Partnership: All these elements will work only if in the process, partnerships are created, and communities are taken into trust and not confronted.

Source
'Drug Use and HIV/AIDS: Reducing the AIDS Risk' UNAIDS 99.1E (English original, March 1999), pages 6-8.