Aids epidemic threatens western Europe, warns UN

The fastest-growing Aids epidemic in the world will soon be knocking on Western Europe's door, United Nations officials warned yesterday. The spectacular growth of HIV and Aids in Eastern Europe and central Asia could no longer be considered a distant problem once the European Union's borders were expanded in the east, Peter Piot, the head of UNAids, said at a conference in Dublin on the spread of HIV. He said: "Aids is a European problem. Of all the social and political challenges facing an expanded European Union, Aids is one of the greatest, requiring determined and sustained action now." UNAids has for many years warned that HIV is in danger of spinning out of control in countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Moldova and the central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The UN Development Programme said last week that one in every 100 adults in Russia, Ukraine and Estonia are estimated to be infected with HIV. It warned that in Russia there were 257,000 known cases of HIV - 7,500 of them among children - but that the actual numbers could be as high as 1.5 million. "Eastern Europe and central Asia have the fastest-growing Aids epidemics in the world, with rapid cross-over from high-risk groups into the general population," Dr Piot said. "Furthermore, rates of HIV infection continue to spread in Western Europe. New infections are again on the increase, a situation not seen since the 1980s." The HIV epidemic in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics of central Asia has exploded out of control within the past decade, he said. "In 1998, when only 30,000 people were living with HIV in the region, who would have thought that today there would be 1.5 million infected people, a 50-fold increase in less than 10 years?"