Sexual intercourse with an infected person.
Contaminated tattooing/piercing instruments.
Exposure to infected blood, transfusions of infected blood, blood products, or organ transplantation.
Although rare, HIV can be passed from a pregnant woman to her baby during pregnancy, labor, and delivery. It’s only slightly easier for mothers to transmit HIV to their babies through breast-feeding.
Some healthcare workers have become infected after being stuck with needles containing HIV-infected blood or, less frequently, when infected blood comes in contact with a worker's open cut or is splashed into a worker's eyes or inside their nose.
The last three occurrences are quite rare - some less than 1%.
Is it enough to merit the practice in question?
That’s each person’s opinion.
My take:
People will use drugs no matter what.
Legalities don’t stop them, and supplying needles won’t have any kind of effect on drug use either way.
It’s about as effective as imposing restrictions on the sale of cigarette lighters to stop people from smoking.
You can't prevent the inevitable.
But, providing clean needles may certainly reduce the temptation of users to reuse/share infected needles.
If something as simple and cost effective as supplying sterilized needles can reduce the percentage of infected population, I’m all for it - because it may spare me should I one day encounter that one person who can infect me.
Montague I doubt you're at risk. Check out the following excerpts from a book I read a few years ago. It was published in 1995, so it's a little dated, but Brown posits that in the U.S. HIV is primarily spread through IV drug use and those who come into contact with people involved with IV drug users. Here are some excerpts from "Black Lies, White Lies" (kinda long):
"It has become abundantly clear, in spite of a great campaign of disinformation and reprehensible scare tactics, that 'AIDS' does not attack the general population. After fifteen years, it remains almost exclusively confined to IV-drug users (about 32 percent of the cases) and a subset of male homosexuals which accounted for about 60 percent of the total 140, 428 AIDS cases in the United States in 1991. The total number of homosexuals who have had 'AIDS' since it was discovered in 1981 was 217,012 as of December 1993."
"About 95 percent of those contract 'AIDS' have a history of drug use--according to Dr. Robert E. Willner in his book Deadly Deception. Willner quotes studies that claim it takes from '500 to 1,000 unprotected sexual encounters to transmit' HIV . . . ."
"The odds of a healthy non-drug-using heterosexual getting 'AIDS' are the same as for getting hit by lightening. And from a population of 255 million Americans, only 140, 428 were living with 'AIDS' as of 1994.
John Lauritsen and Hank Wilson, in their book Death Rush, accuse the CDC of fraud: 'The effect of the CDC's statistical trickery is to underreport IV-drug users as an AIDS group by at least 50 percent; the effect is to construe AIDS as a venereal disease, rather than a drug-induced condition."
One of the world's leading authorities on viruses and retroviruses, Dr. Peter Duesberg, "blames the rise of 'AIDS on the 'massive escalation in the consumption of recreational drugs' in the 1960s and 1970s. In a ten-year period alone, Americans increased their use of cocaine by 200 percent, while the use of amphetamines and poppers skyrocketed among homosexuals. Drug abuse, Duesberg says, resulted in the reemergence of old diseases such as tuberculosis--one of the 'AIDS' diseases--in the 1980s and 1990s."
"Duesberg's theory of how 'AIDS' spreads is simple to follow. He holds that 'AIDS' begins in those who are biologically most susceptible: people whose lifestyles make them perfect hosts for a 'benign' retrovirus (HIV). He says it that HIV hardly ever becomes active even in 'AIDS.' These 'thirdworldized' hosts, all of whom have ravaged their body in some way, include heterosexual drug addicts; and those drug-abusing homosexuals whose irresponsible 'bathhouse' sex behavior exposes them to lethal microbes and the spread of infections."
. . .
More:
"Michael Callen, one of the founders of the People with AIDS Coalition, lived twelve years with 'AIDS.' Just before his death, he offered a compelling confession in HEAL, a publication for alternative health therapies, that lends credence to Duesberg's 'DAIDS' theory [Drug Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome]:
By the age of 27, I estimate I had 3,000 different sex partners. I'd also had: hepatitis A, hepatitis B, hepatitis non-A, non-B; herpes simplex types 1 and 2; shigella; entamoeba histolytica; Giardia; syphilis; gonorrhea; nonspecific urethritis; chlamydia; venereal warts; CMV; EBV reactivations; and finally cryptosporidiosis and AIDS. The question for me wasn't why I was sick with AIDS but rather how I had been able to remain standing on two feet for so long. If you blanked out my name and handed my medical chart, prior to AIDS, to a doctor, she/he might reasonable have guessed that it was the chart of a 65-year-old equatorial African living in squalor.
"Callen very likely put his finger on what is the probable link between the 'AIDS' outbreak among high-risk groups in the West and the malnourished heterosexual population in Africa: a Third World health status. This sort of ravaged immune system first developed in the West among a bathhouse culture of male bisexuals and homosexuals, as well as heterosexual injection-drug users and homosexual long-term recreational drug abusers. These subcultures were extremely vulnerable because of debilitated bodies and a Third World hygiene status."
"`Something other than homosexuality' causes 'AIDS,' says Duesberg. 'Your all-American homosexual neighbor will never get 'AIDS.' It's only the ones who have hundreds, or thousands, of sexual contacts a year. And how is that achieved? Almost exclusively by chemicals.
"Drug abuse is rampant among homosexuals who practice promiscuous sex. For multiple orgasms and as an anal relaxant, this bathhouse subculture routinely uses 'poppers' (amyl nitrite inhalants), and their 'recreational' regime consists of PCP, amphetamines, angel dust, cocaine, heroin, uppers and downers, Valium, and alcohol,' Duesberg explains."
"In my opinion, then, the illness we call 'AIDS' in the United States is not by any means a 'homosexual disease.' I believe it is precipitated by a chemical injury, but it is also triggered by a variety of microorganisms as cofactors that destroys the body's immune system. The process is a deadly synergistic combustion. High-risk 'AIDS' behavior in the West is primarily drug abuse, receptive anal intercourse, poor hygiene, malnutrition, and unprotected sex--especially if there is a history of sexually transmitted diseases."
