PRISONS IDLE ON HEPATITIS: EXPERT

Prison administrators had failed to take responsibility for halting the
rampant spread of hepatitis C in Australia's jails, an expert said.

Kate Dolan, from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre in Sydney,
said that in New South Wales about one-third of male and two-thirds of
female inmates were infected.

Dr Dolan, a senior lecturer at the University of NSW, said in an editorial
in the Medical Journal of Australia that hepatitis C was being spread
through injecting drugs and tattooing in jails.

Research shows that about one-quarter of prisoners inject drugs while
behind bars, mostly with shared equipment.

Dr Dolan said strategies were needed to reduce the number of injecting drug
users going into prison, such as providing more treatment for addiction.

"There is abundant evidence that community-based methadone treatment
reduces injecting, crime and the subsequent incarceration of drug users,
yet only a third of the demand for methadone treatment is met in the
community," she said.

Dr Dolan said that with less than 1per cent of general practitioners
prescribing methadone in NSW, "the first step" in improving treatment would
be to boost these numbers.

Other strategies could include having different punishments for prisoners
who used non-injectable drugs compared with injectables and prison needle
exchange.

Allowing selected inmates to be trained to tattoo and providing them with
sterile equipment might also help.

But Dr Dolan said most of these strategies required the cooperation of
prison commissioners who so far had not accepted that their jails played a
major role in the hepatitis C epidemic.

Prison commissioners had declined to even discuss the recommendations about
hepatitis C made in the National Council on AIDS and Related Diseases
review of government strategy, she said.