Buried in the plethora of articles on the tobacco industry settlement in
the USA, is the claim from Australian researchers that international
evidence clearly shows that needleexchange programs slow the spread of
AIDS. A review of 214 studies on HIV prevalence in the United States,
Europe, Asia and the South Pacific found that the infection increased more
in cities which did not have needleexchange programs compared with those
that did. The average annual change in numbers of people with HIV was 11
per cent lower in cities with programs allowing addicts to exchange used
needles for clean ones. Deputy director of the National Centre in HIV
Epidemiology and Clinical Research at the University of NSW, John Kaldor,
and Susan Hurley, of the University of Melbourne's department of public
health, said the difference was highly statistically significant. The view
that these programs were not effective no longer seemed tenable, the
researchers said in their report published in The Lancet.