Eastern Europe slowly wakes up to AIDS threat

Dec 1, 2005, 0:26 GMT

Berlin - Eastern Europe is marking this year's World AIDS Day with governments in the region now only slowly coming to terms with the threat posed by the spread of the virus.

In Russia, where around one million of the population of 143 million are thought to carry the HIV virus, 2005 brought signs of a long overdue awakening to the threat.

Alarmed into action by forecasts of long-term social and economic damage from the high infection rate, the government announced it will hike spending on prevention and treatment from a paltry 4.5 million U.S. dollars this year to 104 million in 2006.

The amount is expected to rise to 268 million dollars in 2007 under a concerted bid to act before it is too late.

Meanwhile, in Romania the number of adult cases in the country has started climbing fast over the past two years.

A similar picture has emerged in Serbia, particularly Belgrade, which is the black hole of the Balkans when it comes to the number of HIV-infected people, an anti-AIDS activist said.

Due mainly to intravenous drug use, the explosion of HIV/AIDS in Russia over the past decade was consistently played down until 2003, when President Vladimir Putin for the first time publicly acknowledged that the virus was precipitating a disastrous decrease in the population.

In September, however, he said that although an acute problem, the spread of HIV 'is still not an epidemic' in the country, even though the virus has now clearly shifted from drug-using circles into the mainstream population.

And while the public became more aware of the risks of sharing needles and of the limited protection that condoms afford from sexually transmitted diseases, attitudes towards the core issues are still at variance.

Non-governmental groups ran numerous campaigns promoting condom use among young people in recent years.

But drawing from the abstinence-only policies of the Bush administration in the United States, the Moscow city government's first anti-HIV drive currently underway portrays a couple with the slogan 'There is no safe sex', and highlights fidelity within a relationship as the only safeguard.

As the most attractive and open Balkan metropolis in the 1980's, before the fall of communism, Belgrade started importing HIV almost a decade before the region's other cities.

In addition, patients from all over the country gravitated towards Belgrade as it had the only clinic that treats AIDS, Momcilo Janjic of the JAZAS anti-AIDS group told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

With 85 per cent of the 1,113 surviving HIV patients - 890 have succumbed - living in the capital, there are more victims of the virus in Belgrade than in all neighbouring countries combined, excluding Romania.

Worse, JAZAS estimates that for each registered case in Serbia, there is between six and seven that are not, reflecting poor testing habits, equal to what occurs in less developed countries in Asia and Africa.

In comparison, the tiny, fiercely traditionalist Montenegro (with under 650,000 people) has less than two dozen registered HIV cases, while in Bosnia (four million) and Croatia (4.5 million) their numbers are measured by dozens. <!--page-->

To the east, Bulgaria, with its 7.5 million people, has 586 cases, including the 71 found this and 50 from last year.

Of particular concern in Serbia is the rising number of heterosexuals affected by the virus. This includes those aged 15-24, which appears to reflect increasing reckless sexual behaviour.

At the same time, health officials say there are signs of a loosening of the self-imposed restrictions by the nation's gay population with data showing six males currently contracting HIV to every one female.

A grim picture has also emerged in Romania, which hopes to join the European Union in January 2007. Because of contaminated blood and dirty needles used under Romania's former communist regime, about 3,500 children have died from AIDS since the epidemic began.

Moreover, children who received the regime's blood transfusions in the 1980's currently comprise the bulk of the nation's 10,700 HIV and AIDS cases, according to the Bals Infectious Disease Institute.

Although the number of infected Romanian children has been falling from a peak in 1990, the institute said teenagers between 15 and 19 comprised the largest group of the estimated 300 new HIV cases reported last year.

UNICEF recently warned that children who survived the communist blood transfusion programme, which went terribly awry, must be educated now that they are reaching sexually active years.

And in the past two years the number of adult cases in Romania has started climbing fast. Officials are particularly concerned about the spread of infection among Bucharest's large community of drug abusers.