Development & Aid, Europe, Headlines, Health

HEALTH: AIDS Spreading Rapidly in Eastern Europe

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Feb 23 2004 (IPS) - Eastern Europe is seeing the fastest growing AIDS epidemic in the world, studies by UN agencies show.

AIDS is also on the rise again in Western Europe, causing new concern about the spread of the infection in areas thought relatively safe, new data shows.

“Across Eastern Europe and the Central Asian Republics, the number of AIDS cases has grown from 30,000 in 1995 to 1.5 million now,” Dr Gudjon Magnusson from the World Health Organisation (WHO) told IPS Monday. “That is a 50-fold increase in eight years.”

The Baltic states are also experiencing a rapid rise in HIV infections, the studies show.

The WHO and other UN agencies like UNAIDS and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) are highlighting the spread of AIDS in Europe at a two-day meeting in Dublin, Ireland, Monday and Tuesday.

“In western Europe the incidence has risen to between half a million and 600,000 cases,” Magnusson said on phone from Dublin. “The infection in Western Europe began in the 1980s, and in Eastern Europe around the mid-1990s, but the incidence there is already three times as high as Western Europe.”

The numbers are still small compared to the worldwide incidence of an estimated 40 million cases, with about 27 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa, Magnusson said. “But we are concerned about Eastern Europe and the Central Asian Republics because it is rising so rapidly here.”

It is particularly worrying that 80 percent of the infected people in this region are below 30 years of age, Magnusson said. Seventy percent are believed to have contracted AIDS through infecting needles while taking drugs.

At the root of the spread is “poverty, unemployment and lack of faith in the future,” Magnusson said.

Across Western Europe two-thirds of cases of infection are through heterosexual sex, Magnusson said. The Dublin conference is seeking to get political leadership in these countries to undertake strong action to stop the spread of infection and to treat infected people.

“We are also trying to secure more funding and to improve health and education capacity,” he said. Most of these countries have an infrastructure in place unlike many areas of Africa, and therefore levels of knowledge and treatment could be improved in relatively short time, he said.

“AIDS is a European problem,” UNAIDS executive director Dr Peter Piot said in a statement at the conference. “Of all the social and political challenges facing an expanded European Union, AIDS is one of the greatest, requiring determined and sustained action now.”

The countries facing the epidemic will soon be on the borders of the expanded European Union (EU) after its expansion May 1.

A large number of the young in Eastern European and the Central Asian Republics countries also engage in unsafe sex, the conference warns in its statement. “There is also evidence that people are having sex at a much younger age without protection.

The percentage of people reporting premarital sexual relations more than doubled between 1993 and 1999, from 9 percent to 22 percent. Only 10 percent of girls in Tajikistan have ever heard of HIV/AIDS.”

In many countries of Western Europe too, there are increasing rates of sexually transmitted infections, indicating resurgence in unsafe sex, primarily among young heterosexuals, the report says.

In western Europe most people have access to free treatment through national health systems, but “many governments have not focused as much on prevention as they did in the 90’s,” the statement says. “Infection rates are once again on the increase.”

But Europe cannot divide over the issue of AIDS treatment and only provide treatment in the richer countries, WHO director-general Dr Lee Jong-wook told the conference. “Treatment should be a right for all, including for sex workers and injecting drug users.”

In addition to increased AIDS funding from national governments, the World Bank and European Union, the Global Fund to fight AIDS Tuberculosis and Malaria has approved more than 400 million dollars over five years for 22 programmes in 16 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Most of these funds are earmarked for HIV prevention and treatment programmes, along with programmes to control tuberculosis, the biggest killer of people living with HIV.

“Effective HIV/AIDS prevention and care programmes will require that funding from all sources increase to about 1.5 billion dollars by 2007,” said Shigeo Katsu, World Bank regional vice-president for Europe and Central Asia.

“But money alone is not the issue. It is crucial to improve the information base for programmes, to support what works against HIV/AIDS, and to break down the policy and social barriers to effective actions across the region.”