For a decade, Walter L. Bennett waited to release
the pause button on his life, stride through the gates of the South
Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, N.J., and begin his life anew.
Convicted of armed robbery in 1992, he was finally about to make
that walk last June. But before he could resume his life as a free
man, he found it endangered by a harsh truth from his captivity: he
had tested positive for hepatitis C.
Restricting
access to sterile syringes is not only bad public health policy, it
is bad economic policy. There are currently approximately 32,300
people living with HIV in New Jersey. More than half of them became
infected by sharing contaminated needles, or having sex with someone
who did. The current estimated lifetime cost of care for someone
living with HIV is $618,000. This means New Jersey has spent, and
will continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on medical
costs to treat injection-related HIV infections that could have been
prevented by access to sterile syringes.
Pdf 116 kb
** In order to view PDF files, you must have Adobe
Acrobat Reader installed on your computer. Many computers already have
this software; however, if you need it, a free copy is available for
download at this site:
Click
here to get Adobe Acrobat Reader.
