- BUCHAREST -- Europe is facing
a bigger Aids crisis than had previously been thought, the World Bank and
leading medical charities warn.
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- A huge leap in the number of new cases, mostly in eastern
Europe, threatens to put a severe strain on the health services of the
continent, including the western European countries which are the preferred
destination for economic migrants within the EU.
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- Dr Armin Fidler, the health sector manager for the World
Bank's Europe and Central Asian region, said that on present trends, up
to 10 per cent of the population might become infected in some countries.
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- His prediction came as the United Nations prepares to
publish new figures this week which, The Telegraph has learned, will reveal
that there were 360,000 new infections in the region in 2003 - 50 per cent
more than the World Bank had previously estimated, and up from 250,000
new cases the year before. "It's going to get much, much worse,"
Dr Fidler said.
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- The annual report by the Joint United Nations Programme
on HIV/Aids (UNAids) will reveal that eastern Europe, Russia and the Ukraine
have the fastest-growing HIV epidemic in the world, with up to 1.9 million
now infected - a more than tenfold increase over the past nine years.
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- It will highlight two recent additions to the European
Union - Latvia and Estonia - as having some of the fastest rates of increase
in HIV infection in the region. UNAids says that with fewer than 40 per
cent of men in the region using condoms, and since 80 per cent of those
infected are under 30, the outlook is grim.
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- A senior official for one charity in the region said
that the health care systems of Britain and western Europe could crumble
under the influx of incoming HIV victims. Dr Chris Pitt, the director of
the charity World Vision in Romania, said that the rapid spread of HIV
cases in Russia and the Ukraine was already being felt further west, as
thousands who have caught HIV from drug use or the sex trade cross porous
borders into Romania.
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- Dr Pitt questioned the wisdom of allowing Romania into
the EU in 2007. He said much of the money that the Romanian government
designated for fighting HIV had failed to reach frontline health care.
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- World Vision assists with foster homes for the 5,600
surviving Romanian orphans who contracted HIV under the regime of the former
communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu. All are now in their mid-teens and
about to become sexually active.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/04/wai
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