Abstract

Last year, Eurosurveillance Weekly covered an outbreak of severe systemic sepsis in injecting drug users (IDUs) in Norway, Scotland, Ireland, and England (1-14). A report into the deaths of 23 drug users who died after injecting contaminated heroin has now been published by a multidisciplinary team in Glasgow (15,16) and is available at http://www.show.scot.nhs.uk/gghb/PubsReps/Reports/druginfect.pdf. Doctors investigating the outbreak, which also affected drug users in the north west of England and in the city of Dublin in Ireland, have drawn up 12 recommendations to prevent further deaths.