UN CALLS FOR GLOBAL REVAMP OF ANTI-AIDS POLICIES FOR DRUG USERS

BANGKOK (AFP) - Governments must include intravenous drug users in expanded
AIDS prevention and treatment programmes or face an explosion of new HIV
cases in the general population, the United Nations warned Sunday. The chief
of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) told ministers gathering here
for the 15th International AIDS Conference due to begin later Sunday that
countries like Russia needed to stop merely imprisoning drug users but also
provide services such as needle exchanges.

"To avoid a major catastrophe in the near future in Asia and Eastern Europe,
the political and legal environments need to address now the realities of
the various HIV/AIDS epidemics in order to roll out large-scale prevention
and care programmes," Antonio Maria Costa said in his speech provided to
AFP.

"It is a sad fact that globally less than five percent, and in many
high-risk areas less than one percent, of all drug users have access to
prevention and care services.

"In too many countries drug users are simply imprisoned. Not only is this
not a solution, it actually contributes to the rapid increase in the number
of people living with HIV/AIDS."

An estimated 38 million people are living with the human immunodeficiency
virus (HIV). More than 20 million people have died of AIDS since the
condition was first detected among a group of US homosexuals in 1981.

Two-thirds of all current cases are in sub-Saharan Africa, but Asia and
Eastern Europe are seen as new key battlegrounds in large measure because
the epidemic has ravaged the injecting drug user (IDU) communities there.

Asia is home to half of the world's 13 million IDUs.

In several countries more than 50 percent, and in some regions of Asia and
Eastern Europe up to 80 percent, of all injecting drug users live with
HIV/AIDS, Costa said.

"Not enough is being done in the relation between intravenous drug users and
HIV/AIDS, and the community of drug injecting users has been left behind,"
he told AFP. "A pandemic is bound to break out into the general population."

US-based Human Rights Watch in April slammed Russia's draconian drug
policies, citing police harassment of IDUs as a key factor in the virus
rampaging through the drug community.

Although 85 percent of the more than one million Russians living with
HIV/AIDS were infected through narcotics use, drug addicts suffering from
AIDS are excluded from anti-retroviral treatment.

Prisons have become an especially fertile ground for spreading HIV because
of a lack of syringes and condoms, Costa said.

"Overcrowding, homosexual activities, gang violence, lack of protection for
the weakest inmates and corrupt prison management create an environment that
increases vulnerability to HIV transmission," he said.