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Nadine Mather and Chloë Loubser
Needle sharing rife among Egypt's drug users
“Sharing needles and syringes is very high in Egypt. This is very alarming because although only 1 percent of IDUs are HIV-positive, the high percentage of needle sharing may mean that we are sitting on a ticking bomb,” Ehab Kharrat, a senior programme adviser for the UNDP HIV/AIDS Regional Programme in the Arab States (HARPAS), told IRIN.
Different studies of sample groups show that 45-50 percent of drug users in Egypt share needles, he said.
“When the IDUs get the drugs, many of them do not wait to get a clean needle or syringe, so they grab the next available one they find,” Midhat Al-Arabi, head of a programme dealing with drug users at the Freedom Drug Rehabilitation Centre, a local NGO, told IRIN.
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