ADDICTS NEED OUR HELP

The Editor:

I am a little perplexed as to why Dr. Parker would choose to focus on the
statistics for HIV infection when dismissing harm reduction and ignoring
the statistics on hepatitis C ['Don't be so sure that harm reduction is the
answer,' The Times, Feb. 7], as it is with the latter disease where we
truly have a public health crisis in British Columbia.

In 2003, approximately 15,000 Canadians will be diagnosed with hepatitis C,
of which one third will be British Columbians.

This extremely high infection rate in B.C. is not surprising as we already
have the highest hepatitis C infection rate in the country.

Put simply, it has been calculated that 1.5 per cent of all British
Columbians are currently infected, and a lot of them don't know it yet.

The B.C. Centre for Disease Control has estimated that 50 per cent of all
individuals were infected as a result of IV drug use.

However, this also means that 50 per cent were not, so we cannot simply
dismiss this as a drug users' disease or a downtown eastside disease.

Many people are infected with hepatitis C as a result of getting a tattoo
or piercing using unsterilized equipment or sharing a toothbrush or from a
transfusion they received in the 1970s or 1980s.

Bottom line is that the disease is not staying among the IV drug using
community but is leaking out into the general population.

So what are we doing about this problem?

Doing nothing and telling drug addicts to stop injecting is clearly not
going to work and is only going to increase the burden on our healthcare
system as treating liver failure is an extremely expensive undertaking.

Tony Hebden, PhD, Abbotsford