Vol. 6(3), pp. 79-84, March, 2014 DOI: 10.5897/JAHR2013.0270 ISSN 2141-2359 Copyright © 2014 Author(s) retain the copyright of this article http://www.academicjournals.org/JAHR Journal of AIDS and HIV Research Full Length Research Paper Opportunistic infections among human immune deficiency virus (HIV) positive injecting drug users of Dhaka City, Bangladesh Tanni Chowdhury 1 , Obidul Huq 2,3 *, Provat Roy 4 , Mesbah Uddin Talukder 3 and Formuzul Haque 5 1 Centre for Child and Adolescent Health (CCAH), International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh. 2 Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, University of Malaya, 50603, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 3 Department of Food Technology and Nutritional Science, Mawlana Bhashani Science and Technology University, Santosh, Tangail, Bangladesh. 4 Sylhet MAG Osmani Medical College, Sylhet, Bangladesh. 5 Department of Nutrition and Food Engineering, Daffodil International University, Dhaka 1207, Bangladesh. Received 27 August, 2013; Accepted 14 February, 2014 A descriptive cross sectional study was carried out among the 116 human immune deficiency virus (HIV) positive drug addicted people in Dhaka city during September, 2012 to March, 2013. The major objectives of this study were to assess the various spectra of opportunistic infections among drug users who are HIV positive for at least three years. Young adults are more frequent drug users and males are more prone to drug addiction as compared to females. Educational backgrounds of the HIV positive drug users were not satisfactory as most of them were illiterate or primary educated. Most of the male respondents were jobless, whereas most of the female respondents were sex workers. Majority of the drug addicts were low income earners. Infected respondents went to Mukta Akash program; an NGO based treatment and rehabilitation program when their infections got worse. Key words: Opportunistic infections, drug user, human immune deficiency virus (HIV), fungal infections, Mukta Akash. INTRODUCTION Bangladesh is facing a rapidly growing human immune deficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic, in particular, among injecting drug users (IDUs). The first case of HIV/AIDS in Bangladesh was detected in 1989. Since then, 1495 cases of HIV/AIDS have been reported (as of December 2008) (IEDCR and ICDDR, 2011). However, United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimates that the number of people living with HIV in the country may be as high as 12,000, which is within the range of the low estimate by UNICEF's State of the World's Children Report 2009. The overall prevalence of HIV in Bangladesh is less than 1%; however, high levels of HIV infection have been found among IDUs (7% in one part of *Corresponding author. E-mail: obidul@gmail.com. Tel: + 88 01914348212. Author(s) agree that this article remain permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License