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The age of ten: this represents the age of the most junior case with HIV that a local activist has ever met.

When she first started the Fijian Support Network in 2013, this child was yet to be born. Today he represents part of many Fijians to have developed the hematological condition in the past few years – many of them under 20 years old, and a large number through intravenous drug use.

Growing quantities of adolescents are taking narcotics, Ms Naitala clarifies. This young individual was one of those youths that were sharing needles in urban settings throughout the pandemic.

Over the past five years, this Pacific nation – a tiny South Pacific nation with under one million residents – has transformed into the hotspot of one of the world's fastest growing HIV crises.

In 2014, the islands had fewer than 500 people carrying the virus. By 2024 this figure had soared to around 5,900 – an 11-fold increase.

That same year, Fiji registered 1,583 recent diagnoses – a 13-fold rise on its typical half-decade mean. Of those, 41 individuals were 15 years old or under, compared to only eleven in 2023.

Transferring blood

Fueling Fiji's HIV epidemic is a spiralling trend of narcotics usage, risky sexual practices, syringe exchange and bluetoothing.

Otherwise known as blood sharing, this method refers to a practice where a person injecting drugs draws back blood post-consumption and injects it into a second person – who may then do the same for a subsequent individual, and so on.

A Fijian advocate, executive director for the NGO Narcotics-Free Fiji, has observed it taking place firsthand. During May last year, she was on one of her regular dawn excursions through the capital city Suva, offering support and guidance to drug users in public areas, when she changed direction and observed a group of approximately eight people huddling together.

I witnessed the injection device with the blood – it was immediately visible before me, she remembers. This adolescent girl, she'd already had the dose and she's withdrawing her blood – after which there are more women, different adults, already lining up to be hit with this thing.

It's not just injection equipment they're passing around – they're transferring the fluid.

Bluetoothing has also been reported in the South African nation and Lesotho, two countries with some of the world's highest percentages of HIV. In Fiji, this method became popular during recent years, per information from both Ms Volatabu and Ms Naitala.

One reason for its appeal, they elaborate, is a more affordable intoxication: numerous persons can chip in for one injection and share it among themselves. Another is the convenience of requiring just one syringe.

Such items are difficult to come by in Fiji, where medical suppliers, facing law enforcement scrutiny, often demand prescriptions for injection equipment, and there is a lack of needle-syringe programmes.

Despite existing growing acceptance and acceptance for the rollout of such services – which offer safe consumption tools to drug users in a endeavor to minimize the transmission of blood-transmitted diseases like HIV – execution in the highly religious and conservative country has proven challenging.

The advocate says there is a critical absence of safe injection facilities, which is driving hazardous activities like needle-sharing and bluetoothing and assigning the duty on NGOs to provide needles as well as condoms.

In August 2024, Fiji's Ministry of Health acknowledged bluetoothing as one of the drivers for the country's rise in HIV cases. An additional factor was chemical sex, where persons take narcotics - frequently crystal meth - preceding and during sexual encounters.

Across Fiji, contrary to numerous territories globally, the substance is predominantly consumed via intravenous injection.

The medical authorities additionally discovered that of the one thousand ninety-three recent diagnoses recorded in the first nine months of 2024, two hundred twenty-three – about 20% – were from injecting substances.

Youth consuming crystal meth

The Fijian islands has become a primary transit point for crystal meth during the last fifteen years. An important aspect of this development is due to the country's geographic location located among East Asia and the Americas – some of the planet's major producers of the narcotic - and Australia and New Zealand – the planet's top-paying consumer bases.

Throughout that identical timeframe, meth has entered and expanded across local communities, developing into a crisis that, similar to HIV, was recently labeled a countrywide crisis.

And according to workers at ground level, the user population is decreasing.

We notice more and more of these young people, explains the director. They are becoming progressively junior.

Fiji's most recent domestic HIV data cite needle-based consumption as the {most common known|predominant