Estimating the prevalence of injecting drug users on the basis of Markov models of the HIV/AIDS epidemic: applications to Italian data.

This paper addresses some important issues related to the estimation of the extent of injecting drug use. The population of injecting drug (heroin) users in Italy is estimated on the basis of a dynamic model of the health consequences, in particular using AIDS incidence data. The use of the prevalence estimates to monitor the impact of health care and law enforcement interventions is outlined.