Sir - It is unfortunate that your Health and Children Correspondent, Padraig O'Morain, relied almost exclusively on the press release of the Irish Prisons Service when reporting on our survey of hepatitis B and C and HIV in Irish prisoners (The Irish Times, July 27th). Prison management is sceptical of our finding that approximately one fifth of prisoners who inject began doing so in prison. The reason for this scepticism is the known propensity of prisoners to blame their health troubles on the authorities rather than themselves.
Having carried out two surveys in Irish prisons, the results of one of which has just been published in the British Medical Journal, we believe that those with authority to introduce change in the Irish Prisons Services should look at their own practices rather than seek to spin their way out of accepting responsibility for what has been acknowledged for some time as a seriously deficient system. - Yours, etc.,
Jean Long, M.Sc., Shane Allwright, Ph.D., Joseph Barry, MD, Department of Community Health and General Practice, Trinity College, Dublin 2.