It goes beyond sharing needles, they're sharing blood: The manner in which HIV diagnoses soared in the Fijian islands

Just ten years old: this represents the age of the youngest person with HIV that a local activist has ever met.

Upon establishing the Fijian Support Network in 2013, that young boy was still unborn. Now he is part of many Fijians to have developed the bloodborne virus in the past few years – a significant portion under 20 years old, and many of them through needle-based consumption.

Increasing numbers of youth are using drugs, the activist clarifies. He (the boy) was among those youths that were sharing needles on the street during Covid.

Over the past five years, Fiji – a small island country with a population of less than a million – has become the locus of one of the planet's quickest developing HIV outbreaks.

During 2014, the nation had under 500 people diagnosed with HIV. As of 2024 that number had jumped to roughly 5,900 – an 11-fold increase.

During that identical year, the islands recorded 1,583 new cases – a multiplication by thirteen on its usual five-year average. From this group, forty-one were 15 years old or under, as opposed to merely 11 in last year.

Sharing the blood

Fueling the islands' HIV outbreak is a escalating phenomenon of narcotics usage, risky sexual practices, syringe exchange and blood transfer.

Also called blood sharing, this practice indicates a procedure where a substance user withdraws their blood post-consumption and injects it into a second person – who may then perform identical actions for a subsequent individual, and so on.

Kalesi Volatabu, leader for the NGO Narcotics-Free Fiji, has witnessed it occurring firsthand. Last May, she was during her typical morning strolls through the Fijian capital of Suva, providing assistance and guidance to substance users in public areas, when she changed direction and noticed a assembly of seven or eight people clustering.

I saw the syringe containing blood – it was immediately visible before me, she recounts. This female youth, she previously received the dose and she's extracting the fluid – subsequently you see additional females, different adults, already queuing to receive the injection using this item.

It goes beyond injection equipment they're exchanging – they're exchanging the fluid.

Blood sharing has also been reported in the southern African country and the African nation, two countries with some of the world's highest levels of HIV. Throughout the Fijian islands, this method became popular during recent years, per information from the two advocates.

One reason for its widespread use, they explain, is a less expensive experience: multiple people can pool resources for a solitary dose and divide it between them. A further factor is the convenience of needing merely one injection device.

Such items are difficult to come by in Fiji, where medical suppliers, facing law enforcement scrutiny, typically request doctor's orders for injection equipment, and there exists a shortage of needle-syringe programmes.

Even with growing acceptance and endorsement for the implementation of such programmes – which provide clean injecting equipment to drug users in an attempt to reduce the transfer of blood-transmitted diseases like HIV – implementation in the very faithful and conventional society has demonstrated problematic.

The advocate says there is a severe lack of needle-syringe sites, which is fuelling dangerous practices like shared injection equipment and bluetoothing and putting the onus on non-governmental organizations to supply injection equipment as well as condoms.

In August 2024, Fiji's Ministry of Health acknowledged blood sharing as one of the drivers for the country's rise in HIV infections. Another was chemical sex, where individuals consume substances - typically meth - prior to and throughout sexual relations.

Throughout the islands, unlike most other countries around the world, methamphetamine is predominantly consumed via needle administration.

The health department furthermore determined that of the over 1,000 new cases recorded in the first nine months of 2024, approximately 220 – about 20% – were from injecting substances.

Youth consuming crystal meth

The Pacific nation has transformed into a major Pacific trafficking hub for the substance over the past 15 years. A significant portion of this situation is attributed to the islands' placement situated between Eastern Asia and American continents – some of the planet's major suppliers of the substance - and Australia and New Zealand – the globe's most lucrative markets.

During that same period, crystal meth has entered and disseminated through island societies, developing into a crisis that, similar to HIV, was recently declared a domestic catastrophe.

And according to workers at ground level, the age of users is trending downwards.

We notice increasing numbers of these young people, explains the director. They are growing progressively junior.

Fiji's most recent domestic HIV data identify needle-based consumption as the {most common known|predominant