Cebu cases of injecting drug users with HIV up

Puerto Princesa CITY, Philippines – The Department of Health (DOH) underscored the need to reconcile the country’s laws and policies on HIV-AIDS and illegal drugs as cases of injecting drug users with the dreaded virus have been reported not only in Cebu City but also in 11 other towns and cities in Cebu.

“It’s no longer confined in Cebu City and this is not a good development,” Dr. Gerard Belimac, program manager of the DOH’s National AIDS/Sexually Transmitted Infection Prevention and Control Program, said on the sidelines of the “HIV, AIDS and the Media” seminar here.

The list of the 11 Cebu towns and cities is not immediately available.

From January to March this year, the DOH’s Philippine HIV and AIDS Registry recorded the first 68 cases of injecting drug users who tested positive for HIV and they all came from Cebu City.

Belimac said the figure rose to 120 after more cases of HIV-infected injecting drug users were recorded in the 11 other localities in Cebu. The cases were among the 700 HIV cases monitored from January to May this year.

All of the 120 Cebu cases involve the unemployed, with the youngest a 15-year-old male teenager.

Since January 1984, the DOH has recorded 5,123 HIV cases, 841 of them progressing into AIDS.

In 2000, a new case was reported every three days, but this rose to one case per day in 2007 and two new cases per day in 2009. For the month of May this year though, the DOH documented 153 cases.

The rapid increase in HIV cases was attributed primarily to men who have sex with men, including not only homosexuals but “straight” men, too.

Injecting drug users, according to Belimac, might soon become the biggest contributor to the HIV-AIDS epidemic because the virus spreads faster through injection of illegal drugs than by any other means as an infected needle is often used by four to 10 drug users.

“It’s really a network. They know the shooting galleries and they go there (for pot sessions). If we don’t do something to stop this immediately, all injecting drug users will become infected with HIV. We cannot let that happen,” he said.

To effectively curb the spread of HIV among these drug users, Belimac cited the need to reconcile the “contradictory” laws and policies on illegal drugs and HIV-AIDS.

“The policies on drugs are geared toward the reduction of drug abuse while the policies on HIV are focused toward protecting people from getting HIV infection. It’s difficult to reach out to them because they avoid us, thinking that they will be arrested because they are engaged in the use of illegal drugs. But all we want to do is inform them of the risk of injecting drugs,” he said.

The Philippine National AIDS Council, the multi-sectoral group leading the fight against HIV-AIDS, and the Dangerous Drugs Board are now discussing how to address the problem.

“We still have the opportunity now to stop this because we know where the drug users are. We just have to do the right thing and act now,” Belimac said.