Nairobi — Drug users may get clean, free needles as part of a campaign to reduce new HIV infections.

A team comprising officials from the government, the United Nations and US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, has been set up to work out the guidelines on how this will be done.

"The guidelines will seek to treat drug addiction as a disease, not a criminal act," said Dr Nicholas Muraguri, head of the National Aids Control Programme.

"Second to blood transfusion, needle sharing is the most effective mode of HIV transmission," Dr Muraguri said on Thursday.

Needle sharing first became popular at the Coast, where drug users make up 17 per cent of new infections, but the habit is now catching on in Nairobi.

A study published in medical journal The Lancet last week estimated that if Nairobi adopted proper control measures immediately, it could reduce HIV prevalence among this group by 30 per cent in four years.

But with the best of interventions, there will still be more than 2,000 new infections among injecting users in Nairobi in the next four years.

The study, carried out by the UN and four international universities, reviewed reports on HIV infection in injectors from 2000 to 2009 and chose Nairobi, Karachi in Pakistan and Odessa in Ukraine as case studies.

The study estimated heroin users in Nairobi at about 24,500, with almost half using injections. Out of a hundred injectors, more than a half were HIV positive.

"Although 73 per cent of Nairobi injectors knew about the risk of HIV transmission, 28 per cent had used a needle after someone, and 43 per cent had passed their own needle to another in the past six months," says the study. By 2008, injection-drug use accounted for 3.8 per cent of HIV infections in Kenya.

If people in Nairobi were allowed to legally carry clean syringes and needles, the police will need to understand they are not necessarily up to no good.

"There are plenty of problems with police. If they stop you with clean syringes, you are hassled; they will plant drugs in the syringes unless you pay them," says one study participant.