American opposition to injection rooms and needle exchange for intravenous drug users is not undermining the fight against HIV/AIDS and other diseases that can be spread by dirty needles, a U.S. official said Monday.

The so-called harm reduction programs are aimed at stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS and other blood-borne infections by ensuring that intravenous drug addicts have sterile equipment for the injection of narcotics.

But critics say they amount to condoning illegal drug use.

John P. Walters, director of United States National Drug Control Policy, said in a speech at this year’s annual session of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crimes that the majority of the international community opposed injection rooms and similar narcotics “appeasement” programs.

He rejected the idea that opposition to such programs is “somehow an impediment to efforts addressing another global crisis, the spread of HIV/AIDS and other blood-borne pathogens such as Hepatitis C.

“This charge is wrong. The conventions (opposing such programs) are a bulwark against the public health tragedy of blood-borne diseases and the public health tragedy of drug use and addiction,” Walters said.

Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental human rights watchdog, said in a statement on its Web Site that of the approximately five million new HIV infections in 2004, an estimated 10 percent stemmed from injection drug use.

“In some countries, such as Russia, injection drug use accounts for up to 75 percent of reported HIV cases,” HRW said. “HIV/AIDS among injection drug users is spread chiefly through the sharing of blood-contaminated syringes,” it said.

But Walters said it was drug use itself that was behind the danger of HIV and other infections - not the lack of injection rooms or other such programs.

“Continued drug use is a fundamental cause of the dangers we face from blood-borne diseases,” he said, adding the United States commitment to fighting HIV/AIDS and other blood-borne diseases was “unmatched in the world community.”

Walters said that it was not only intravenous drug users who spread HIV and other diseases. He said the high-risk behavior of narcotics users in general was a danger factor.