The health crisis pushed by a drug crisis
Photo:
Copyright:
lightfieldstudios
Six months after Fiji declared an HIV outbreak, driven largely by a growing methamphetamine crisis, UNAIDS' Pacific advisor says other countries around the region are at risk of following suit.
"It does worry me. We have all the risk factors in all the countries that could be another possible crisis like what's happening in Fiji," says Renata Ram, whose work covers 14 Pacific Islands countries.
She says testing of HIV around the Pacific Islands is poor, so they don't have a clear picture of the scale of the problem, but several countries including Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Tonga have reported an increasing number of cases.
Fiji had 1583 new cases last year.
"This is the highest total that they've ever seen. It's a 281 percent increase from 2023," says Ram.
And while free, life-saving treatment is available, barriers including delays in receiving results, a mobile population, spread-out geography and a stigma about the disease all play in to a relatively low uptake of treatment.
Ram has been working for UNAIDS since 2017, and said the landscape had changed in that time.
"The HIV epidemic was largely driven by sexual transmission, however in early 2019 we started hearing sporadic cases of injecting drug use and domestic drug use, due to all this drug trafficking that was happening through Fiji."
One practice that had received a lot of attention and blame for spreading the virus is called 'bluetoothing", where after one person gets a hit, they withdraw their blood and share it with other people. It is a high-risk way of 'sharing' a high, which experts say does not work.
It comes with a high risk of contracting various blood-borne diseases, including HIV.
But Ram said this had been overblown.
"There's been a lot of sensationalisation around bluetoothing, but it's not the main way people who use drugs actually consume their drugs, it's a very small percentage of people who actually do this.
"Sharing needles is the main cause."
Ram said that, of the data they were able to get, about 48 percent of people in Fiji had contracted HIV through injecting drugs, compared to about 43 percent from sexual transmission. There were also 32 cases last year of mother-to-child transmission.
It is clear that behind the HIV crisis is a drug crisis.
Behind the drug crisis was a change in the way that drug trafficking through - and to - Fiji worked.
On today's episode of The Detail, an expert in transnational crime explains how drug trafficking through Fiji has changed in the past several years to depend more on local syndicates, and the effect this is having on Fiji's drug use and resulting HIV rates.
José Sousa-Santos, lead and convenor of the Pacific Regional Security Hub at the University of Canterbury, said drugs came through the Pacific Islands to New Zealand and Australia, which, despite being small markets, had some of the highest prices, due to tight control of the market.
But when local traffickers were paid in drugs instead of cash, they needed a local market to sell to.
"It's not the larger cartels that are looking at getting the local populations addicted, it's the smaller regional syndicates, the national syndicates, which can now really profit from these local markets.
"This creates 'foot soldiers' who help move drugs through.
"It leads us to see the roadmap toward Fiji in the future - if this is not addressed urgently - becoming a semi narco state ... where the syndicates and the cartels have undue and strong influence over the state itself and where the government will struggle to maintain law enforcement," he says.
Check out how to listen to and follow The Detail
here
.
You can also stay up-to-date by liking us on
or following us on
.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles

RNZ News
an hour ago
- RNZ News
Should you lie to your children about pain?
children health 25 minutes ago Off the back of Jesse's chat with American psychiatric nurse practitioner Allison Sweet Grant about lying to kids about pain, we speak to an expert here about how she deals with children and pain. Nicola Woollaston, manages the Play specialist team at Starship Hospital and says there are different techniques depending on children's age.

RNZ News
2 hours ago
- RNZ News
Urgent funding needed to save cuts to South Auckland hospice
health politics 37 minutes ago The New Zealand Nurses Organisation says urgent funding is needed keep a South Auckland hospice from cutting services. NZNO delegate Ed Boswell-Correa spoke to Tuwhenuaroa Natanahira.

RNZ News
5 hours ago
- RNZ News
Potential gamechanger for prostate cancer diagnosis
When it comes to cancer, prostate is the second biggest killer of men in New Zealand - and the number of cases is on the rise. Diagnosis can be invasive and painful - not to mention the additional stress of waiting for biopsy results from a stretched pathology service. However a team of researchers from the Te Whai Ao Dodd-Walls Centre have developed a potential gamechanger in the detection and diagnosis of prostate cancer. Led by Dr Claude Aguergaray from the University of Auckland, their laser diagnostic tool is ready for its first clinical trials. Dr Aguergaray talks to Kathryn Ryan about how it could reduce the number of biopsies and improve surgical outcomes, saving money - and lives. Tags: To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.