HIV growth rates in Estonia, Russia and Ukraine among world's highest

Russia, Ukraine and Estonia have some of the world's fastest HIV growth rates, the United Nations Development Program declared in a report released Tuesday. The world body said one in every 100 adults of the three countries is infected. According to the report on HIV and AIDS in the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS, and Eastern Europe, the HIV crisis poses a threat to the region's economic growth, placing new pressure on already threadbare social welfare programs. ``It is already too late to speak of avoiding a crisis,'' said Kalman Mizsei, the U.N. Development Program's assistant administrator for Europe and the CIS, in a statement. The crisis has increased health spending from 1 to 3 percent of the nations' gross domestic product and cut annual GDP growth by 1 percent due to premature death among the productive population. ``Nevertheless, there is still much that governments and civil societies can do to reduce the social, demographic, and economic consequences of HIV/AIDS and even reverse the epidemic,'' Mizsei said in the statement. The U.N. AIDS agency, UNAIDS, estimates that up to 280,000 people in the CIS and Eastern Europe had contracted HIV last year. In all, some 1.8 million people in the region have HIV, according to UNAIDS data. According to Tuesday's report, 80,000 people required treatment for AIDS but only 7,000 were receiving it. AIDS in Russia and other former Soviet republics appeared later than in other countries, but then spread rapidly due to weak anti-drug and prevention programs.