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 AIDS
Activists Criticize Axing Prison Tattoo Program
by The Canadian Press
Posted: January 13, 2007 - 11:00 am ET
(Toronto, Ontario) The head of the Public Health Agency of Canada says the
government's cancellation of a pilot project designed to limit the spread of
infectious diseases by providing sanitary tattooing services had too little time
to prove its worth.
Dr. David Butler-Jones says the single year given the pilot project is
inadequate to establish whether such a program affects rates of HIV,
hepatitis C and other infectious diseases.
His comments appear online in an article published by the Canadian Medical
Association Journal.
Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day chopped the $600,000 program, calling it
a waste of taxpayers' dollars that wasn't ``demonstrably effective.''
A national survey suggests 45 per cent of prisoners get tattoos and 17 per
cent have body piercing, often using dirty needles. The program trained an
inmate to provide sterile tattoos to fellow prisoners under staff supervision.
Butler-Jones, whose agency is charged with tracking and preventing illness
while promoting good health practices, says he wasn't consulted before the
Corrections Canada program was ditched.
``When you have multiple inputs and factors, it's very difficult to do that
in one year,'' he said of the trial. ``In general, the best you could probably
hope to see would be some change in behaviours that serve as a surrogate to, you
would anticipate, lower rates of infection.''
``But you need to do the research in a rigorous enough way, for long enough,
to determine whether that behaviour is sustained.''
Butler-Jones said he believes harm-reduction measures like safe tattooing are
a key component of reducing the spread of infectious diseases in prisons.
``This was one method that, from a public health perspective, makes sense as
one of the initiatives of a broader strategy or program,'' he said. ``And in
this case, the government has decided that it is not something that they want to
continue.''
Although not conclusively proven, it's likely ``you run the risk of
increasing'' infection, Butler-Jones added. ``But in terms of (the government's)
overall strategy, if you reduce the risk in other ways, you end up with a
`disease-neutral outcome.' ''
``It's too soon to tell exactly what's going to happen.''
The prevalence of infectious diseases in Canadian prisons has long been of
concern to public health officials, along with the cost of treating sick
inmates.
Corrections Canada told the CMAJ that more than 3,300 male and female inmates
in Canada's 54 prisons had hepatitis C in 2004, for a prevalence rate of 25 per
cent, and almost 2,500 were released into the community that year. As well,
almost 200 prisoners were infected with HIV.
The annual cost of treatment is $29,000 per inmate for HIV and $26,000 each
for hepatitis C.
Day declined to release an evaluation of the pilot project undertaken by
Corrections Canada's audit branch, saying it's in the final stages of
translation and unavailable. The pilot was launched in August 2005 with money
from the $85-million federal AIDS Initiative, which is overseen by the Public
Health Agency.
©365Gay.com 2007
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