To tackle addiction, the French look beyond drugs to care for the person

The health problems of millions of Americans are directly related to patients' failure to follow doctors’ orders. Community health workers are increasingly successful in New York and other American cities – not to substitute for doctors, but to help patients stick to their treatment plans.

Two columns on how Iran averted a major AIDS epidemic through needle exchange programs; a conservative theocracy is successfully treating drug abuse as if it were Amsterdam.

One-pill-a-day generic AIDS drugs for poor countries are hard to make because each ingredient is patented by a different pharmaceutical company. The Patent Pool provides a way for companies to donate their intellectual property safely.

About 40 percent more people in the state are seeking treatment for addiction today than a year ago - but the number of deaths from heroin is going up. Local government is scrambling for both funding and awareness to combat the issue.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug overdoses are the leading cause of injury-related mortality. Naxolone, a drug used to revive overdose victims, is only available by prescription. However, private organizations have distributed Naxolone kits nationally, showing that the drug can save lives when it is more readily accessible.

Adolescent smoking remains a challenging health problem because of the allure of cigarette branding. Australia is piloting the transformation of cigarette packaging with a generic look that reduces the appeal of smoking. In Florida, the Truth campaign has exposed that cigarette companies targeted teenage consumers and, in response, created a set of new advertisements that presented the cigarette industry with transparency.

For decades, AIDS has taken the lives of millions of people and infected millions more worldwide. The key to reducing the effect of AIDS, and even potentially curing it, involves treating patients as early as possible after being diagnosed with HIV, before the disease damages organs. San Francisco General Hospital developed the RAPID program for this purpose, with the goal of “Getting to Zero” the number of new infections and deaths.

Two Iranian brothers worked as doctors to reform how Iran tackles HIV, moving the country toward the harm reduction approach. By providing clean needles and methadone, the doctors were able to lower infection rates, even in prisons.

Two columns on how Iran is treating its massive epidemic of injecting drug use by tackling it as a health problem, effectively lowering H.I.V. rates among drug users using an approach to drugs known as harm reduction.

In a mountainous region of Lesotho, a man named Tsepo Kotelo visits 20 villages every week on his new motorcycle to provide health care to local villagers. The Elton John AIDS Foundation gifted the motorcycles to Kotelo and his colleagues, allowing them to increase the number of patients they visit by 600 percent. An organization called Riders for Health helps maintain the bikes, ensuring that remote villages will continue to receive medical care.