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As many as 21 million people worldwide inject drugs, putting them at heightened risk for infection from blood-borne pathogens such as the hepatitis C virus (HCV), especially if syringes are shared.
A newer type of syringe designed to reduce HCV transmission by decreasing the so-called dead space—the volume that exists between the syringe hub and needle in comparison to standard and widely used high dead space designs—is not particularly effective, a new Yale School of Public Health-led study has found.
The research is published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
The study’s lead author, Professor Robert Heimer, and colleagues from the Yale schools of medicine and public health and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at Yale, concluded that the best of the low dead space (LDS) syringe-needle combinations still retained HCV infection, though it reduced the percentage of contaminated syringes to 65 percent compared to 98 percent found for standard high dead space (HDS) syringes.
None of the LDS syringes yielded percentages comparable to insulin syringes with fixed needles. This design had the lowest proportion of hepatitis C infection; only 47 percent yielded viable HCV.
“Attempts to reduce HCV transmission through engineering design seemed to hold great promise to protect people who required syringes with larger volumes or needles with higher gauges than are found on insulin syringes,” said Heimer. “Unfortunately, none proved equal to the insulin syringes.”
Read more: http://publichealth.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=11491