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| |  Study Raises Questions On Effectiveness Of Needle Exchange Programs MONTREAL, QC -- December 16, 1997 -- A research team led by Montreal doctors today published a controversial study showing important findings concerning the development of preventive strategies related to HIV transmission, especially needle exchange programs. The study reports, among other things, that injection drug users have a higher seroconversion rate when participating in a needle exchange program than non-attenders. The results appear in this week’s American Journal of Epidemiology The research team was led by doctors from the Centre Hospitalier De Montreal (CHUM), St-Luc campus and McGill University. In Canada, implementation of needle exchange programs started in 1989 -- almost simultaneously in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. These programs aim at increasing accessibility to sterile needles and syringes and removing circulating contaminated injecting material. In North America, injection drug use and sharing of used syringes and injecting material are, at the present time, among the major routes of HIV transmission and are largely responsible for the new observed infections. The authors said that this association does not establish a cause to effect relationship nor does it condemn needle exchange programs. "These worrisome finding, however, raise questions on the effectiveness of these programs as implemented within the local context of prevention and care for drug users in Montreal," they write. These results comprise 1,599 subjects enrolled between 1988 and 1995. These findings have been in the center of a controversy in the United States, since they were used by the congress, in September 1997, to support the government's position not to lift the ban on the federal funding of needle exchange programs.
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