View Item 

The long winding road of opioid substitution therapy implementation in South-East Asia: challenges to scale up

Access Status
Open access
Authors
Reid, G.
Higgs, Peter
Sharma, M.
Date
2014
Type
Journal Article

Metadata
Show full item record
Citation
Reid, G. and Sharma, M. and Higgs, P. 2014. The long winding road of opioid substitution therapy implementation in South-East Asia: challenges to scale up. Journal of Public Health Research. 3 (1): 204 (6 p.).
Source Title
Journal of Public Health Research
DOI
ISSN
School
National Drug Research Institute (Research Institute)
Remarks

This article is published under the Open Access publishing model and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ Please refer to the licence to obtain terms for any further reuse or distribution of this work.

URI
Collection
Abstract

In South-East Asia Region (SEAR) there were an estimated 400, 000 - 500,000 people who inject drugs (PWID). HIV prevalence among PWID was commonly 20% and higher in Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, and some regions of India. Opioid substitution therapy (OST) has been implemented as an important HIV prevention intervention in the Region. Various key challenges and barriers to scale up of OST exist: pervasive stigma and discrimination towards PWID; crimilization of drug use overshadowing a public health response; lack of political will and national commitment; low financial investment; focus towards traditional treatment model of detoxification and rehabilitation; low dose of OST; and poor monitoring and evaluation of programmes.Local evidence has highlighted that OST can be successful within the Asian context. Such evidence should be utilized more widely to advocate for policy and increased political commitment to ensure OST reaches a substantial greater number of drug users than currently exists.