Bangladesh, which is known as a low HIV/AIDS prevalent country, has witnessed a rapid rise of the infectious disease among the ‘key populations’ in recent years.

Female sex workers, men who have sex with men (MSM), and injecting drug users are identified as the key populations because they have the highest risk of contracting and transmitting HIV. Prof Md Shamiul Islam, Line Director of the AIDS, STD Programme in Bangladesh, said the prevalence rose to 3.9 percent in 2016 from 0.7 in 2011.

It was only 0.3 percent even in 2002, a drop from 0.4 percent in 1998-99 when the first study was done.

“The rise is due to injecting drug users,” he said while interacting with journalists of Bangladesh Health Reporters Forum on Sunday at his office.

The government runs programmes through the NGOs to prevent injecting drug users from sharing needles through which the virus goes into blood.

But this rise means that the programme has not gone well.

“I would call it a failure of the programme which was targeted at injecting drug users,” he said. He added they have introduced a new approach called Opioid Substitution Therapy or OST to deal with drug users who share syringe. OST is an “advanced harm reduction option” for the drug users.

The government through its supervised clinical settings supplies illicit drug users with a replacement drug, a prescribed medicine such as methadone, which is usually administered orally.

“Oral administration means there is not risk of HIV infection and also gradually we can take them out of drug use. We have 1,700 drug users so far under this OST programme,” the line director said.