9261 HEPATITIS C REPORT GALLEY - North West Public Health ...

Figure 3: Percentage of injecting drug users with hepatitis C and B infection
against number of different drugs injected during lifetime
% INFECTED
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
HEPATITIS C + HEPATITIS B +
1 2-5 >5
NUMBER OF DIFFERENT DRUGS EVER INJECTED
The proportion of IDUs sharing injecting equipment ever and in the last four weeks is
shown in Table 1b. Whether the subject had ever shared needles or syringes was
associated with hepatitis C infection in the univariate analyses (Table 4). However, sharing
variables did not remain significant after multivariate adjustment for imprisonment,
length of injecting history and polydrug use. This is discussed further in Section 5.
For hepatitis B, sharing needles and syringes was associated with infection (Table 4).
However, after multivariate adjustment, only sharing spoons (a two-fold increase in risk
of infection) remained significant (OR = 2.13, CI 1.01-4.52, p = 0.048). In addition,
having used (without injecting) or injected most of the named drugs, except Temgesic
(buprenorphine) and crack, was related to hepatitis C infection (Table 5). However, in the
case of heroin and anabolic steroids there was too little variation to use in statistical
analyses, with too many subjects using heroin and too few using steroids (Table 5).
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H EPATITIS C IN INJECTING DRUG USERS IN THE N ORTH W EST