On a recent afternoon, Brittany Combs drove a white SUV through a neighborhood at the northern end of Austin, Indiana. In the back of her vehicle, there were hundreds of sterile syringes, each in a plastic wrapper.
"Anybody need clean needles today?" she shouted out the window at people sitting on front porches or walking down the street. When Combs, a nurse with the Scott County Health Department, got takers, she made sure they had a unique ID card before opening up the hatch and handing each of them a week's worth of syringes.
Combs' SUV serves as Scott County's mobile needle exchange unit. The needle exchange program is part of the county's emergency response to the largest HIV outbreak in Indiana's history—more than 160 people have tested positive since December—most of the cases are linked to injection drug use. By giving injection drug users access to clean needles, the county hopes to interrupt the spread of HIV.
[For more of this story, written by Jake Harper, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...-on-needle-exchanges]
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