by the National Institute on Drug Abuse

About the author: The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the principal biomedical and behavioral research agency of the U.S. government. NIH is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

There is little doubt today about the connection between drug use and HIV infection, which leads to AIDS. What might be less well appreciated, but just as true, is the strong connection between drug use and other infectious diseases, particularly hepatitis C and tuberculosis. Drug use is now the major risk factor identified in new cases of AIDS, hepatitis C, and tuberculosis in the United States, and a growing number of cases of these infectious...