Reported victims of needle spiking have tested positive for HIV.
It is extremely rare for HIV to be contracted via an unsterilised needle. In the UK it is recommended that people wait six weeks after possible exposure to test for HIV. A test a few days after exposure would not accurately determine whether someone has been infected and would need to be repeated several weeks later. For many of the recent reports, this time span has not elapsed.
In October, reports of women being spiked via injection in nightclubs and bars began to emerge. As they did, posts on Facebook and Twitter started wrongly claiming that victims had tested positive for HIV shortly after being spiked with a needle.
Some messages from official accounts, such as West Yorkshire Police, also warned that being injected with an unsterilised needle could expose someone to HIV.
It is technically possible to contract HIV through a used needle, but the National AIDS Trust has said that cases are “extremely rare”. The organisation also described the posts about reported spiking victims testing positive for the virus days after being spiked as “demonstrably false”, owing to the fact that it takes four to six weeks for HIV to reliably be detected on testing.
Deborah Gold, the chief executive of the National AIDS Trust, told Reuters: “In the UK it is recommended that people wait six weeks after possible exposure to test for HIV. This ensures that those testing can be confident that any negative test is accurate.”
Ms Gold said anyone who thinks they have been exposed to HIV in the past 72 hours should go to A&E or a sexual health clinic, where a treatment called post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) can be given to stop an HIV infection after the virus has entered the body.
She added: “There have been no confirmed cases of HIV infections from needle stick injuries in the UK since 1999, and whilst it is possible to acquire HIV by sharing unsterilised injecting equipment, in the UK the number of examples of this each year is very low.”
When someone who has potentially been exposed to HIV presents to a medical professional, they would usually be given a blood test to establish whether or not the patient already had HIV. They would then be tested again following a window period, after which HIV antibodies would appear, therefore making the infection detectable.
This fact check is based on an extract from a wider article we recently published about reports of spiking with needles. For more information including police updates, perspectives from experts and statistics on spiking incidents, click here.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because it is not possible to accurately test whether someone’s been infected with HIV immediately after being injected with a used needle.
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