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Just ten years old: this represents the age of the youngest person with HIV that Sesenieli Naitala has encountered.

At the launch of the Fijian Support Network in 2013, this minor was yet to be born. Today he represents one of thousands Fijians to have developed the bloodborne virus in the past few years – numerous individuals in their teens, and a large number through injecting substances.

Growing quantities of adolescents are taking narcotics, the activist explains. The child was among those adolescents that were passing around needles in public areas during Covid.

During the last half-decade, this Pacific nation – a minor Pacific territory with a population of less than a million – has emerged as the epicenter of among the globe's most rapidly expanding HIV epidemics.

During 2014, the islands had less than five hundred people carrying the virus. As of 2024 this figure had jumped to approximately 5,900 – an 11-fold increase.

During that identical year, the nation recorded one thousand five hundred eighty-three recent diagnoses – a multiplication by thirteen on its usual five-year average. Among these, 41 were 15 years old or under, versus only eleven in the previous year.

Transferring blood

Underpinning Fiji's HIV epidemic is a growing pattern of substance consumption, unprotected intercourse, syringe exchange and hotspotting.

Also called blood sharing, this latter term refers to a procedure where an intravenous drug user draws back blood post-consumption and administers it into a second person – who may then perform identical actions for a third, and so on.

Kalesi Volatabu, leader for the NGO Drug Free Fiji, has witnessed it occurring firsthand. During May last year, she was while conducting her usual early morning walks through the Fijian capital of Suva, offering support and information to substance users throughout the city, when she rounded a bend and noticed a group of seven or eight people grouping closely.

I witnessed the injection device holding blood – it was right there in front of me, she recalls. This young woman, she'd already had the dose and she's extracting the blood – subsequently you've got additional females, different adults, already queuing to be hit with this thing.

It's not just needles they're sharing – they're sharing the blood.

Blood sharing has furthermore been recorded in the South African nation and the African nation, both territories with among the globe's most elevated percentages of HIV. Throughout the Fijian islands, the practice gained popularity during recent years, as stated by the two advocates.

An important factor for its widespread use, they explain, is a more affordable intoxication: numerous persons can pool resources for one injection and distribute it within the group. Another is the ease of only needing a single needle.

These can be difficult to come by in Fiji, where drug stores, subject to police monitoring, often demand doctor's orders for syringes, and there is a lack of needle-syringe programmes.

Although there is expanding support and endorsement for the implementation of these initiatives – which offer safe consumption tools to substance users in a endeavor to decrease the transmission of blood-transmitted diseases like HIV – deployment in the deeply spiritual and conservative country has shown difficult.

Ms Volatabu says there is a drastic shortage of safe injection facilities, which is driving dangerous practices like needle-sharing and hotspotting and putting the onus on non-governmental organizations to provide needles as well as contraceptives.

During August 2024, Fiji's Ministry of Health identified hotspotting as one of the drivers for the country's rise in HIV cases. Another was chemical sex, where individuals consume substances - often methamphetamine - preceding and during sexual encounters.

Throughout the islands, differently from many nations worldwide, the substance is primarily taken via needle administration.

The medical authorities furthermore determined that of the one thousand ninety-three fresh infections documented in the initial three quarters of 2024, two hundred twenty-three – roughly one-fifth – were from intravenous drug use.

Kids on meth

The Fijian islands has become a primary transit point for the substance throughout the recent period. A significant portion of this development is due to the nation's strategic position located among East Asia and the Americas – some of the world's biggest producers of the narcotic - and Australia and New Zealand – the planet's top-paying destination countries.

Throughout that identical timeframe, crystal meth has infiltrated and disseminated through domestic populations, evolving into a emergency that, comparable to the virus, was recently identified as a countrywide crisis.

And according to individuals in direct contact, the user population is getting younger.

We see growing quantities of these young people, says Ms Volatabu. They are becoming younger and younger.

The islands' latest countrywide infection figures cite intravenous substance use as the {most common known|predominant