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Staying safe: injectors who avoid hepatitis C
Magdalena Harris, Research Fellow, Centre for Research on Drugs and Health
Behaviour, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Abstract
Current harm reduction interventions have not been
successful in stemming the high incidence of hepatitis C virus (HCV)
infection among people who inject drugs (PWID). Approximately 50% of
PWID in England have been exposed to HCV, with this rising to over 60%
among long term injectors. Staying Safe is an international
qualitative research project that aims to learn about HCV avoidance
from the experts - people who have been injecting drugs for the long
term and who have not contracted HCV. This presentation will discuss
methods and findings from the London and Sydney project sites and
explore how these might inform harm reduction interventions. Methods
included the use of life history interviews and computer generated
timelines to elicit detailed data about participants' injecting
practices, circumstances, and social networks over time.
Results
indicate that the factors that motivated and enabled participants to avoid risk situations, and which might have helped them to 'stay safe', were not necessarily related to harm reduction
messages or HCV transmission avoidance. These included the ability and
inclination to maintain social and structural supports, to mainly
inject alone, to manage withdrawal and to avoid injecting-related
scars. These findings point to the multiple priorities that facilitate
viral avoidance among PWID and the potential efficacy of non-specific
HCV harm reduction interventions for HCV prevention.
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Biography
Magdalena Harris is a Research Fellow at the London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is currently lead researcher on the
qualitative research project: 'Staying Safe: A sociology of how people
who inject drugs avoid hepatitis C in the long term'. Magdalena's
background is in Health Sociology and she completed her PhD
'Negotiating the pull of the normal: Embodied narratives of living
with hepatitis C in New Zealand and Australia' at the University of
New South Wales in 2009. Magdalena's research interests include:
Auto-ethnographic and narrative methodologies, issues affecting people
who inject drugs, phenomenology, embodiment, marginalised populations,
stigma, drug and alcohol use, chronic illness experiences and hepatitis C.
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