"Health & Medical News"

The NAACP, National Urban League and other groups called on Congress to end the federal ban on funding needle-exchange programs, saying that the harm-reduction strategy has been proven to prevent HIV/AIDS, the Associated Press reported Feb. 6.

The plea was made in coordination with the Harm Reduction Coalition and in conjunction with National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. Federal funding for needle exchanges have been banned for 20 years, although most states fund the programs.

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Rates of post-storm addiction and mental-health problems among Hurricane Katrina and Rita survivors can be directly correlated to how long they were displaced from their homes, according to new research from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

The study found that while most survivors displayed great resiliency after the storms, the rate of addiction and mental-health programs was much higher among those who had been forced from their homes for two weeks or more.

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Texas is the only state in the U.S. that still does not have a needle-exchange program, but one 73-year-old lay chaplain is risking arrest to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS among drug users, the Los Angeles Times reported Jan. 28.

Bill Day, who has AIDS and heads the Bexar Area Harm Reduction Coalition, was recently arrested and faces up to a year in prison for distributing clean needles to addicts. But Day says the ban on needle-exchange programs is immoral and that he will continue his work.

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With a Congressional funding ban finally lifted, the District of Columbia government announced that it will spend $650,000 of local taxpayers’ money to establish needle-exchange programs aimed at cutting HIV/AIDS transmission among drug users, the Washington Post reported Jan. 3.

In its FY2008 budget plan, Congress ended a ban on D.C. using public funds to fund needle exchanges, although a ban on federal funding for the harm-reduction programs remains in place. D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty said the clean-needle programs are needed to help reduce the HIV/AIDS rate in the city, which is among the highest in the nation.

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A survey by the AIDS Project of Central Iowa found that most of the Democratic candidates for president said they would support needle exchange programs to help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS among injection-drug users, Medical News Today reported Nov. 30.

Each candidate was asked, “Do you support access to sterile syringes, as a means of protecting public health, by lifting the ban on federal funding for syringe exchange?” Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, former Sen. John Edwards, and Sen. Joseph Biden all answered “yes” to the question.

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Discarded needles on city streets and vacant lots have neighbors of a Philadelphia needle-exchange program in an uproar, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported Oct. 30.

The? Prevention Point program is the target of criticism from residents of the Kensington neighborhood, who blame weekly visits by a needle-exchange van to East Tuscalum Street for the dangerous debris. “The kids used to play football in the grass,” said resident Ellen Maenner. “They can’t anymore because of the needles. And you can’t see them all the time in the grass.”

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