HIV incidence among IDUs declined sharply to near zero during eight years of project implementation through 2011, with much of the increase occurring in the early years of the interventions. These results were found in three provinces that were sites of the Cross-Border HIV Prevention Project for IDUs. The project, led by Abt Associates, was funded jointly by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Ford Foundation, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, the U.K. Department for International Development, World Bank, the Australian Agency for International Development, and an anonymous donor. The article’s lead author, Ted Hammett, was the Cross-Border project’s director and is a vice president in Abt Associates’ International Health division.

 

The interventions represented a comprehensive peer education model embracing multiple methods of providing sterile injection equipment, risk reduction information for drug users, public health infection control through collection and safe disposal of used needles/syringes, and community education and mobilization. The project targeted the border areas of Ning Ming County, Guangxi Province, China and Langson and Ha Giang Provinces, Vietnam, which are affected by large-scale drug trafficking as well as small-scale cross-border drug purchase and use.

 

“The project sites all saw dramatic reductions in HIV risk behaviors, HIV prevalence, and HIV incidence,” Hammett said. “By comparison, other provinces of Vietnam and China that did not benefit from the Cross-Border project’s interventions have not experienced such declines in HIV prevalence. This combination of results suggests strongly that the Cross-Border interventions played a major role in controlling HIV epidemics among IDUs in the project sites.”

 

Homepage photo: Needle and syringe distribution by village doctor in Ning Ming, China in 2006.