San Francisco Isn’t Sharing Like It Used To
I love studies and this study makes me particularly happy, speaking as it does to my home: needle-sharing among drug injectors in San Francisco is down, as is the spread of hepatitis C (HCV) and hepatitis B (HBV). The September issue of Hepatology said as much in, outlining the results of a study run by the National Cancer Institute’s Fan-Chen Tseng and Thomas R. O’Brien and Weill Cornell Medical College’s Center for the Study of Hepatitis C’s Brian R. Edlin.
Like HIV, HCV and HBV are not only life threatening alone but also can lead to other devastating health problems like liver disease. A common problem among drug injectors shortly after they begin to shoot their drugs intravenously, measures like needle exchange programs sought to remedy the problem by providing clean needles as well as sanitary water, cottons and cookers. These needle exchanges, open during specific times during the week, also have outreach workers who bring their wares out to where people are using. They also provide harm reduction education services and access to medical professionals who understand the need for buprenorphine and is available to help them get treatment with Subutex or Suboxone and get off needles for good.
Though the nurse practitioners at needle exchanges cannot prescribe Suboxone or Subutex, Meditox doctors can. Doctors must be certified to dispense buprenorphine or else they cannot prescribe it to anyone. Finding a doctor who is certified isn’t always easy, especially when the education as to how buprenorphine works isn’t as widespread as it could be—and should be. Meditox makes it easy by providing you with doctors who are capable of prescribing you the drug and helping you develop a treatment plan to break your addiction to opiate drugs, whether you take them in pill form or with needles.
The authors of the study say: “It is encouraging that the frequency of HCV and HBV appears to have decreased markedly among new initiates to injection drug use in the San Francisco Bay area. If the reductions in the prevalence of these infections can be sustained, the risk of end stage liver disease and liver cancer should decrease in this population.”
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