24th Meeting of the UNAIDS Programme Coordinating Board: Decisions, recommendations, conclusions

8.1 Requests the UNAIDS Secretariat and the Cosponsors, in particular UNODC, to significantly expand and strengthen the work with national governments to address the uneven and relatively low coverage of services among injecting drug users and to develop comprehensive models of appropriate service delivery for injecting drug users in line with relevant national circumstances and the UNAIDS/UNODC/WHO “Technical Guide for countries to set targets for Universal Access to HIV prevention, treatment and care for injecting drug users”
  • Harm reduction

8.2 Recognizing that resources should be expanded for service delivery and capacity development to enable communities to provide prevention, care and support services to drug users living with HIV on a larger scale whilst, at the same time tackling the issue of stigmatization and discrimination requests UNAIDS and its stakeholders to work with multilateral donors, and national governments, to facilitate greater resource mobilization on this issue, consistent with the level of identified need
  • Harm reduction

8.4 Calls upon Member States to further harmonize national laws governing HIV and drug use, in accordance with relevant national circumstances both from a public health and a human rights perspective
  • Harm reduction

8.7 Calls upon Member States, civil society organizations and UNAIDS to increase attention to certain groups of non-injecting drug users, especially those who use crack cocaine and amphetamine type stimulants, and those who abuse alcohol, and their link to increased risk of contracting HIV through high-risk sexual practices, as well as to responses to emerging epidemics of injecting drug use in many African countries
  • Harm reduction

8.8 Recognizing that existing data on HIV and drug use are far from adequate in both quality and quantity, requests UNAIDS to support greater investment in data collection required to inform the development of HIV prevention, treatment, care and support initiatives, resource allocation and comprehensive service delivery, including a system of regular and rapid assessments of the risk potential for new epidemics where anecdotal evidence indicates an emerging problem, and calls upon Member States to ensure accurate estimates are made of the size of IDU populations, while taking into consideration the shifting patterns of injection
  • Harm reduction

8.9 Encourages governments to reaffirm commitment to, and intensify harm reduction efforts in relation to HIV as enumerated in the UNAIDS/UNODC/WHO “Technical Guide for countries to set targets for Universal Access to HIV prevention, treatment and care for injecting drug users”; including needle and syringe programmes and opioid substitution programmes, essential for reaching universal access to comprehensive HIV prevention, care, treatment and support for people who use drugs in accordance with relevant national circumstances
  • Harm reduction

8.1 Requests the UNAIDS Secretariat and the Cosponsors, in particular UNODC, to significantly expand and strengthen the work with national governments to address the uneven and relatively low coverage of services among injecting drug users and to develop comprehensive models of appropriate service delivery for injecting drug users in line with relevant national circumstances and the UNAIDS/UNODC/WHO “Technical Guide for countries to set targets for Universal Access to HIV prevention, treatment and care for injecting drug users”
  • Harm reduction

8.2 Recognizing that resources should be expanded for service delivery and capacity development to enable communities to provide prevention, care and support services to drug users living with HIV on a larger scale whilst, at the same time tackling the issue of stigmatization and discrimination requests UNAIDS and its stakeholders to work with multilateral donors, and national governments, to facilitate greater resource mobilization on this issue, consistent with the level of identified need
  • Harm reduction

8.4 Calls upon Member States to further harmonize national laws governing HIV and drug use, in accordance with relevant national circumstances both from a public health and a human rights perspective
  • Harm reduction

8.7 Calls upon Member States, civil society organizations and UNAIDS to increase attention to certain groups of non-injecting drug users, especially those who use crack cocaine and amphetamine type stimulants, and those who abuse alcohol, and their link to increased risk of contracting HIV through high-risk sexual practices, as well as to responses to emerging epidemics of injecting drug use in many African countries
  • Harm reduction

8.8 Recognizing that existing data on HIV and drug use are far from adequate in both quality and quantity, requests UNAIDS to support greater investment in data collection required to inform the development of HIV prevention, treatment, care and support initiatives, resource allocation and comprehensive service delivery, including a system of regular and rapid assessments of the risk potential for new epidemics where anecdotal evidence indicates an emerging problem, and calls upon Member States to ensure accurate estimates are made of the size of IDU populations, while taking into consideration the shifting patterns of injection
  • Harm reduction

8.9 Encourages governments to reaffirm commitment to, and intensify harm reduction efforts in relation to HIV as enumerated in the UNAIDS/UNODC/WHO “Technical Guide for countries to set targets for Universal Access to HIV prevention, treatment and care for injecting drug users”; including needle and syringe programmes and opioid substitution programmes, essential for reaching universal access to comprehensive HIV prevention, care, treatment and support for people who use drugs in accordance with relevant national circumstances
  • Harm reduction

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Released a year after the CND res 51/14 which called for better co-ordination between CND and PCB in relation to HIV and injecting, these decisions and recommendations of the PCB focused on the need for implementation of the Technical Guide (8.1), and, crucially, for resourcing (8.2). Importantly for CND the resolution specifically calls on governments to scale up HIV related ‘harm reduction’ (8.9)

It addressed the need for law and policy reform to bring drug laws into line with human rights and public health goals (8.4)

It addressed non-injecting drug use, including ATS (8.7) which remains a gap in harm reduction responses.

The PCB also noted the challenges in data collection and called for improvements. This is vital for CND as the governing body of UNODC which has taken in-house the former data collection of the independent reference group on HIV and injecting drug use. (8.8)

  • Harm reduction