Infection Resulting in Amputation Raises Questions About Asian Immigrants’ IV Use.
Whenever the endless shifts at the day spa in Flushing, Queens, where Myung Hwa Jang worked got to be too draining, Ms. Jang’s colleagues would head down the street for some refreshment. And so on a brisk day in February, feeling run down, Ms. Jang found herself in a storefront clinic, a needle in her arm and a bag of solution she knows as “ringer” sliding into her veins. . .
In China, however, drips are so commonly prescribed that the country’s national health organization started public awareness campaigns to try to limit the practice. According to the World Health Organization, China is among the countries that use the most intravenous treatments; in 2010, the last year for which data is available, the region averaged 4.18 injections per person per year; the world average is just 2.88. The W.H.O. estimates that over a half-million new cases of hepatitis B were contracted there that year because of unsafe injection practices, and more than 6,000 new cases of H.I.V.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/27/nyregion/infection-resulting-in-amputation-raises-questions-about-asian-immigrants-iv-use.html?hp
