HIV on rampage in Europe, Asia
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A Ukrainian AIDS victim.
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DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) -- The virus that causes AIDS is spreading again in Western Europe and is rampaging through Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where it infected 250,000 people last year, a United Nations health official said Monday.
While Africa bears the brunt of the disease, Eastern Europe and Central Asia are experiencing the fastest-growing HIV epidemic in the world, said Peter Piot, the executive director of the U.N. AIDS organization.
In 1998, 30,000 people in those two regions had HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, but the number has since ballooned to 1.5 million, he said.
Piot spoke on the opening day of a two-day meeting of 55 nations seeking to rally financial and political support to combat HIV/AIDS in a region where, officials said, there is much complacency about the disease.
Conference host Ireland, the current EU presidency holder, said it will prod its partners to integrate the fight against HIV/AIDS into the European Union's development policy and to get drugs companies to provide cheap medicines to treat the disease.
"The EU should adopt a far more coherent and strategic approach to the fight against HIV/AIDS in all of the world's regions," said Irish Development Minister Tom Kitt.
He called for an EU "ambassador" to coordinate Europe's contribution to the fight against a disease that has gone global in 20 years and now affects 40 million people worldwide.
He said EU governments must push drugs companies to provide cheap anti-HIV/AIDS medicine to poor countries. The costs of these drugs have come down drastically -- from $20,000 per person per year a decade ago to $500.
In Eastern Europe, the drugs fetch "the highest prices in the world," Piot said, but he did not specify an amount.
The conference brought together health ministers from 55 nations -- from Ireland to the Caucasus -- as well as Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and the Irish rock star and rights activist Bob Geldof.
Geldof accused European governments of ignoring Africa, where 75 percent of the world's 40 million HIV/AIDS sufferers live.
"Of the 2.5 million deaths in 2002, 2 million were African," he said.
Meanwhile in Washington, U.S. President George W. Bush unveiled a 5-year $15 billion emergency plan aimed at turning the tide in the global fight against the HIV/AIDS pandemic. (Full story)
In Western Europe, efforts at prevention ran out of steam after the introduction in the 1990s of antiretroviral drugs that slow the progression of HIV infection into full-blown AIDS. As a result, death rates fell from more than 20,000 in 1996 to 3,500 but Western Europe registered "30,000 to 40,000 new infections last year, an unacceptable occurrence for one of the richest regions in the world," said Piot.
According to a draft of the conference declaration to be issued Tuesday, the Dublin conference will make a commitment that by 2005 "at least 80 percent of injecting drug users" in all of Europe and Central Asia must be in HIV treatment or prevention programs.
Also, as of 2005, 90 percent of people aged 15 to 24 must have access to the HIV/AIDS information and at least 100,000 who have HIV or AIDS must have access to antiretroviral treatment.
By 2010, there must be "universal access" to anti-HIV/AIDS drugs in Europe and Central Asia and HIV infection among infants must be eliminated, said the draft.
The World Bank said last fall current efforts to "curb HIV/AIDS in the region are too small to have an effect," adding prevention and care programs require a fivefold rise in funding -- from $300 million in 2001 to $1.5 billion by 2007.
The U.N. Development Program said last week that one in every 100 adults in Russia, Ukraine and Estonia carries HIV.
It reported more than 257,000 HIV cases in Russia in 2003, more than 7,500 of them among children. But experts estimates the actual number of infected Russians is between 700,000 and 1.5 million.
Copyright 2004 The
Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
