Commentary

The US war on harm reduction: fixing policy on intelligence and facts

Alex Wodak

• Correspondence: Alex Wodak awodak@stvincents.com.au

Author Affiliations

Director, Alcohol and Drug Service, St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, Australia

Conjoint Senior Lecturer, School of Public Health and Community Medicine, School of Medicine, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Harm Reduction Journal 2005, 2:14 doi:10.1186/1477-7517-2-14

Published: 15 September 2005

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

At a two-day private meeting in Tokyo in June 2005, some of Japan's most senior politicians and powerbrokers met to consider the steadily expanding HIV/AIDS epidemic. AIDS has recently become a matter of increasing concern in Japan following an HIV epidemic in several major Japanese cities among Japanese men having sex with men at sex-on-premises venues. The Japanese elites at the Tokyo meeting were shocked to learn that the United States has by far the highest annual AIDS incidence among OECD countries at 15/100,000 [1]. Spain, with an annual AIDS incidence of 3.3/100,000, has the second highest rate among industrialized countries, while Australia was well down the ranking with an incidence only one tenth that of the United States at 1.5/100,000 [1].