HEALTH and security officials are struggling to collaborate against a regional drug crisis which has been described as “spiraling out of control”.
Public health experts say that law enforcement agencies undermine efforts to combat the drug-driven spread of HIV in Fiji, putting the wider region at risk.
Transmission of the disease in the Pacific is now surpassed by the Philippines within the Asia-Pacific.
Fiji’s National HIV Response Taskforce chair Dr Jason Mitchell said a greater effort was needed in the area of HIV detection and prevention.
“I think a lot of times when we are trying to introduce strong public health interventions, there’s opposition, oftentimes from our law enforcement agencies,” Mitchell told a regional security conference in Suva, Fiji.
He said progressive prevention measures, such as needle and syringe programmes, were often opposed at all levels of Pacific governments.
Mitchell said that the growth of HIV was linked to the growing Pacific drug trade.
“About 50 percent of people who were infected with HIV last year were as a result of intravenous drug use”
In Fiji, HIV infections rose ten-fold between 2014 and 2024. According to a new UNAIDS report, “Aids, Crisis and the Power to Transform” Fiji stands out in all the worst ways.
UNAIDS head Renata Ram agreed that law enforcement agencies posed specific challenges in the work with sex workers and men who have sex with men.
“The criminalisation of these populations in many Pacific Island countries contributes to increased stigma and discrimination, driving them further away from essential health and HIV services.”
Ram said that colonial-era laws that continue to criminalise same-sex relations, sex work and drug possession are causing HIV-infected persons to avoid seeking help.
Fiji Police Commissioner Rusiate Tudravu said officers were fighting a war on two fronts: trying to hold back the spread of drugs internally, while stopping the flow of drugs into the country from the wider Pacific.