PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to test whether particular actions on the part of adult protective services (APS), the elderly victim, and/or society's response to abusive individuals, are associated with the continuation of abuse after the close of an APS investigation and thereby compromise victim safety. METHOD Interviews were conducted with 71 APS caseworkers, 55 of the elderly vict...

Heroin overdose deaths are preventable. Overdose prevention in Australia has largely rested on opioid substitution treatment supplemented with outreach services and education for injecting drug users (IDUs) about overdose risks and responses. We believe now is the time to make naloxone hydrochloride (Narcan ®) available to Australian IDUs to help prevent overdose deaths. At the end of 2000 hero...

The art of medicine Tilting at windmills and the evidence base on injecting drug use After reading through many of the 500 or so papers on harm reduction in drug users listed in the PubMed database, it's hard not to conclude that researchers are really bad at understanding the evidence base. Paper after paper begins its introduction with a homily about the need for evidence-based policies. Pape...

This study examined the effect of morphine on oral infection with virulent Salmonella typhimurium. Animals were treated with a 75-mg slow-release morphine pellet followed by inoculation with salmonellae. Morphine markedly sensitized mice to oral infection, as assessed by survival, mean survival time, and colony culture. By 24 h after Salmonella inoculation, morphine-treated mice had a 105-fold ...

BACKGROUND Cohort studies provide an excellent opportunity to monitor changes in behaviour and disease transmission over time. In Australia, cohort studies of people who inject drugs (PWID) have generally focused on older, in-treatment injectors, with only limited outcome measure data collected. In this study we specifically sought to recruit a sample of younger, largely out-of-treatment PWID, ...

BACKGROUND Opioid substitution treatment (OST) has multiple benefits for heroin injectors and is an evidence-based major component of international treatment. The current qualitative study sought to explore participants' attitudes to and reasons for participating in a feasibility randomised trial in primary care offering 'same day' OST (methadone) for injecting heroin users compared to usual ca...