Unsafe sex is a far more common cause of the spread of HIV-AIDS across sub-Saharan Africa than unsterile needles used for medical injections, U.N. agencies said.
A team of experts largely from the World Health Organization and UNAIDS, in an article published in The Lancet medical journal, rejected a recent suggestion that Africa’s epidemic was driven by unclean needles used in medical injections and blood transfusions.
By reasserting widely-held views that heterosexual sex spreads HIV/AIDS in up to 90 percent of adult cases on the continent, they vindicated existing prevention programs which focus on teaching safe sex and use of condoms.
An estimated 26.6 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s hardest-hit region, were living with HIV/AIDS at year-end, according to UNAIDS.
A Pennsylvania-based consultant, David Gisselquist, led a group of researchers who a year ago defied conventional views and blamed dirty needles for up to 40 percent of adult cases of HIV/AIDS in the region.
But a team led by George Schmid, of WHO’s department of HIV/AIDS, rejected the unorthodox findings after reviewing the same data as well as other studies.
Needles not major factor
“We concluded that epidemiological evidence indicates that sexual transmission continues to be by far the major mode of spread of HIV1 and that unsafe injections, while important to eliminate, do not contribute nearly the proportion of cases as has been suggested,” Schmid told a news briefing in Geneva.
“Unsafe injections — defined as the reuse of needles or syringes in the absence of sterilization — are not sufficiently common to play a dominant role in HIV transmission in sub-Saharan Africa,” he added.
Most injections in sub-Saharan Africa are given intramuscularly and contamination of needles after such use is “infrequent,” according to the team of 15 which included experts from Belgium, Britain, Uganda and the United States.
Schmid endorsed WHO’s estimate that unsterile needles and syringes account for just 2.5 percent of HIV/AIDS transmission in Africa.
“Ideally we would like to see further studies done to corroborate our conclusions and investigate more precisely the role of unsafe injections,” he added.
