AIDS has spread to over half a million people in the U.S. and is the leading cause of death for Americans age 25 to 44.

And a third of the Americans who get AIDS today get it because they shared a needle with an infected person or came in contact with a person who shared a needle and became infected.

There are a million drug-injecting men and women in the U.S., and they cost America more than $50 billion annually in health care, lost productivity and crime, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But these injecting drug users will not die alone; their needle sharing partners, sexual partners and children will all be infected.

While getting drug injectors into treatment and off drugs is the ideal answer, many are not ready to quit.

Even those who are highly motivated may find few services available. With frequent waiting lists, fewer than 15 percent of intravenous drug users are in treatment at any given time.

For those who cannot or will not stop injecting drugs, the best way to avoid spreading HIV is to use a sterile needle for each injection, or at least try not to share needles.

Unfortunately, there are just not enough needles to go around. Ten states and the District of Columbia still have laws requiring a doctor’s prescription to buy a syringe, disregarding the four government studies recommending a repeal of that law.

Even when permitted by law, pharmacists are often unwilling to sell syringes without a prescription, according to the American Journal of Public Health.

Around the world, needle exchange programs have sprung into action to address drug injection risks.

Nearly all needle exchange programs have a strictly enforced one-for-one exchange.

For every used syringe a patron brings in, they are given a sterile syringe in its place.

Needle exchange programs are not created to encourage drug use.

In addition to having distributed 5.4 million syringes, U.S. needle exchange programs have the potential to act as a bridge to drug treatment; they can provide referrals and services for HIV counseling.

A study of a San Francisco needle exchange program that opened in 1988 found that from 1987 to 1992, frequency of injecting drugs among street-recruited intravenous drug users declined from 1.9 to 0.7 injections per day.

The mean age of these users increased from 36 to 42 years and the percentage of new initiates into intravenous drug use dropped from 3 percent to 1 percent.

These statistics leave their interpreters to conclude that needle exchange programs may lower the number of injecting drug users, or at least not attract new users.

Needle exchange programs are helping to clean up the streets.

The amount of discarded needles found along the way, waiting to prick an unsuspected passerby, can be substantially cut down thanks to the enforced one-for-one exchange.

The number of discarded syringes in the vicinity of the Portland Needle Exchange Program decreased by almost two-thirds after the program was implemented.

Needle exchange programs do reduce the spread of HIV.

Needle exchange programs are based on a sound principle, eliminating the item that helps transmit infections from one person to another.

An article in a 1994 edition of The New York Times described a comprehensive study of needle exchange programs that revealed the rate of new HIV infections in program participants to be 2 percent.

Comparatively, an early study estimated a 4 percent tp 7 percent HIV infection rate among intravenous drug users not involved in the exchange.

Ramblings of concurring statistics and studies could continuously spill onto the page.

But the bottom line is simply this: We know needle exchange programs work.

So why aren’t we using them?

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Ellyn Peterson is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Algona.