Prevalence of HIV and injecting drug use in men entering Liverpool prison: Table 1

Abstract

Studies in countries other than England and Wales suggest that a comparatively high proportion of people entering prison have a history of injecting drug use before imprisonment and that drug use does not always stop once people are incarcerated.1 Consequently the sharing of injecting equipment by drug users in a Scottish prison led to the infection of at least 13 inmates with HIV.2 Currently, little information is available on the number of drug users entering prisons in England and Wales, their HIV prevalence, or their levels of injecting drug use once incarcerated. Therefore, discussion about the potential for injecting related HIV transmission within these prisons often requires extrapolation from data gathered in other countries.3 To examine the potential role of English prisons in drug related transmission of HIV and other bloodborne viruses we …