Pubdate: Sun, 21 Nov 1999 Source: Age, The (Australia) Copyright: 1999 David Syme & Co Ltd Contact: 250 Spencer Street, Melbourne, 3000, Australia Website: http://www.theage.com.au/ Author: Melissa Marino Note: The following link was provided for more information: www.hepatitiscinfo.com 'SNORT, SMOKE, BUT DON'T INJECT' A leading drugs authority has encouraged heroin users to either snort or smoke the drug, rather than inject it, to help stop the spread of hepatitis C and HIV. Dr Alex Wodak, the director of the Alcohol and Drugs Service at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital, yesterday told a Melbourne conference the incurable strain of hepatitis was now the biggest health threat to injecting drug users. Dr Wodak said the number of injecting drug users with hepatitis C was a bigger problem for Australia than HIV, costing the health budget more than $150 million a year. He told the Seventh Annual Symposium on Hepatitis B and C that of the 11,000 people who became infected with hepatitis C in Australia in 1997 91 per cent injected drugs. Dr Wodak said the number of Australians who injected drugs doubled every 10 years and heroin production was doubling or tripling every decade worldwide. He criticised as inadequate the systems for detecting heroin smuggled into Australia. Only 2 per cent of people entering the country each year were searched for drugs, he said, and only 3500 of the two million containers coming into Australia each year were searched. Dr Wodak said the health care system would be swamped unless different approaches to drug abuse were adopted. He said injecting rooms should undergo trials and said it was realistic to encourage users to snort or smoke drugs rather than inject. At $20 to $30 a cap, heroin was cheaper than it had ever been, he said. Dr Wodak said that since the Netherlands had introduced injecting rooms the number of injecting heroin users had halved and the rate of new users had declined. He said Australia had made positive progress in its efforts to control drugs and disease and should be commended for its needle exchange programs. If clean needles were not readily available in Australia, HIV "would have spread like wildfire and we'd have an even bigger problem". He said Australia was handing out more needles than the United States. The symposium was told by Professor Andrew Lloyd of the University of New South Wales that between 40 and 50 per cent of male prisoners and 70 to 80 per cent of female prisoners had hepatitis C. Drugs were readily available to prisoners but needles were not and sharing was common, he said. - --- MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart