A Look At The Cambridge Needle Exchange

Jamie Zimmerman, Manager of the Cambridge Needle Exchange, gives a tour of the facility and talks about the importance of this needle exchange program with MassAve, MA‘s Jamie Bologna.

According to Zimmerman, more than 70 percent of their clients 1,500 annual clients are white, almost 20 percent are Latino, and about 7 percent are African American. More than a third of those serviced by the exchange are homeless. She says that the exchange distributes about 150,000 needles each year, with a roughly 85 percent needle return rate, and the center conducts about 200 HIV/HCV/STI tests annually.

(Banner photo by Todd Huffman/flickr. SoundCloud photo by staxnet/flickr)