Intravenous drug users are at a higher risk of contracting HIV and other blood-borne diseases than the rest of the population, but those numbers are unsteadily decreasing nationwide.

“Sharing needles, syringes and other injection equipment puts people who inject drugs at high risk for getting HIV and other infections, including hepatitis,” said a representative for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to the CDC, annual HIV diagnoses among people who inject drugs decreased by 48 percent from 2008 to 2014. Different groups are more or less likely to contract HIV from injecting drugs such as heroin, and diagnoses among black and Hispanic or Latino individuals who use injected drugs have fallen at a higher rate than those for white individuals.

Annual HIV diagnoses among black, Hispanic and Latino individuals fell by 50 percent between 2008 and 2014, but annual diagnoses for white individuals who use injected drugs fell by only 28 percent between 2008 and 2012. Between 2012 and 2014, no significant decrease in caucasian drug users with HIV was recorded by the CDC.

In New York state, the Department of Health has specific programs that work to cut down on the transmission of HIV through drug use.

“Preventing the transmission of HIV through intravenous drug use is vital to New York’s harm reduction program and ending the epidemic in New York state,” said Erin Silk, media representative for the New York state Department of Health.

Silk said in the 1990s, over half of those newly infected with HIV had a history of injection drug use. However, currently, fewer than 2 percent of new HIV diagnoses are related to injection drugs.

Currently, the Department of Health is seeing more issues with Hepatitis C, which is a viral infection that leads to liver inflammation.

“We are seeing an increase in Hepatitis C diagnosis that is clearly tied to [intravenous drug use],” Silk said.

In Oswego County, approximately 15 people died in 2015 due to an opioid overdose, 78 were sent to the emergency room, and 18 were hospitalized, according to the New York State Opioid Annual Report from October 2017.

Onondaga County had approximately 327 deaths, 2,265 emergency room admissions and 473 hospitalizations due to opioid drug overdose in 2015, according to the same report.

In the Syracuse region, which is how the Department of Health breaks down their report on HIV infections, including Cayuga, Cortland, Herkimer, Jefferson, Lewis, Madison, Oneida, Onondaga, Oswego, Saint Lawrence and Tompkins counties into one statistical area, a total of 1,034 people are living with HIV that has not turned into AIDS, and 1,256 people are living with AIDS.

New diagnoses of HIV in the region for 2016 totals to 67 people.

Using the state-provided metric of less than 2 percent of new HIV diagnoses being attributed to injected drug use, approximately one person in the entire region contracted HIV from injected drugs, if the local trend follows statewide trends.

The Department of Health declined to provide information on the local links between HIV and intravenous drug use.

“There are a small number of cases [of drug related HIV infection], and for privacy concerns, I cannot provide you information,” said Jiancheng Huang, the Oswego County public health director. “In the county, we have a few HIV cases.”

The CDC provides guidelines for injection drug users, suggesting that they use only new, sterile syringes, dispose of used syringes in a safe manner and never share injection equipment.

The federal government also allows states to use some federal funds to finance syringe service programs, which provide safe areas for injection drug users to administer drugs with minimized health risks. The CDC suggests that local law enforcement “address legal and law enforcement barriers that prevent or discourage the use of [syringe service programs] and substance use disorder treatment.”

One of the most prominent cities to follow this CDC suggestion is Ithaca. The Ithaca Plan, a series of 25 recommendations for addressing the injection and opioid drug addiction problems in the city, seeks to treat drug addiction as a public health issue, rather than a law enforcement issue, according to Gwen Wilkinson, coordinator for The Ithaca Plan and former Tompkins County district attorney.

“Addiction is clearly a disease, and most of if not all the collateral effects of addiction, such as Hepatitis C, HIV, they’re all public health issues,” Wilkinson said. “Arresting people and putting people in jail is not going to fix it.”

The Ithaca Plan was drafted in February 2016, and certain aspects, including the safe space to inject drugs, are not currently available.