After 30 years, @WHO finally begins pushing single-use syringes

Yesterday, the WHO officially updated its injection safety recommendations to call for the widespread adoption of single-use syringes, as well as a reduction in unnecessary injections (e.g., administering medications orally if they do not need to be injected):

A 2014 study sponsored by WHO, which focused on the most recent available data, estimated that in 2010, up to 1.7 million people were infected with hepatitis B virus, up to 315 000 with hepatitis C virus and as many as 33 800 with HIV through an unsafe injection. New WHO injection safety guidelines and policy released today provide detailed recommendations highlighting the value of safety features for syringes, including devices that protect health workers against accidental needle injury and consequent exposure to infection.
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Transmission of infection through an unsafe injection occurs all over the world. For example, a 2007 hepatitis C outbreak in the state of Nevada, United States of America, was traced to the practices of a single physician who injected an anaesthetic to a patient who had hepatitis C. The doctor then used the same syringe to withdraw additional doses of the anaesthetic from the same vial – which had become contaminated with hepatitis C virus – and gave injections to a number of other patients. In Cambodia, a group of more than 200 children and adults living near the country’s second largest city, Battambang, tested positive for HIV in December 2014. The outbreak has been since been attributed to unsafe injection practices.
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WHO is urging countries to transition, by 2020, to the exclusive use of the new “smart” syringes, except in a few circumstances in which a syringe that blocks after a single use would interfere with the procedure. One example is when a person is on an intravenous pump that uses a syringe.

Setting aside my horror that repeat use of non-sterile needles in still a thing in healthcare facilities here in the US, I saw this as a positive move on WHO’s part and assumed that the “smart” syringe referred to in the press release and several headlines was something only recently developed. After all, injection drug use has been the primary driver of HIV and hepatitis infections in Eastern Europe and Central Asia for years, and it is a significant component of the epidemics in southeast Asia and China’s Yunnan province as well.

Imagine my chagrin when I came across this piece from the Guardian‘s Global development professionals network. It tells the story of Marc Koska, the British inventor of the K1 single-use syringe, who has apparently been trying – unsuccessfully – to get the global health community to jump on this bandwagon…for 30 years.

Using existing technology Koska came up with a syringe that falls apart after one use, and sold his first one in 1997. Even though he’s sold more than 4 billion auto-disable syringes since, he has been repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to make the world aware of the problem caused by reusable syringes. “It’s been a very frustrating journey. Thirty years to get WHO turned around. Thirty years to get the manufacturers turned around. You’ve got too many parts to expect it to be a three year journey.”

“There is a very basic reason why it hasn’t happened and that is because the manufacturers haven’t had a market,” he argues. “If the manufacturers could sell a product and it was identified where they were going to sell it and who was going to pay for it, they would make it.
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“Today, [WHO Director Margaret] Chan is a hero, but I think the next chapter might be just as challenging as the first bit,” he says.

“My gut feeling is that the ministries of health will be most resistant, because they’ve been saying for so long that they don’t have a problem of reuse in their countries. They’re never going to say that ‘we’ve got a terrible problem with hepatitis C because I can’t be bothered to buy enough syringes’. So now ministers have got to change their position and say, from Tuesday, we’re only going to buy auto-disable syringes.”

The frustrations of market forces blocking the development or widespread adoption of critically-needed global health resources is an old hat to most in the field, but this seems particularly egregious…WHO really should have caught on much sooner.