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HIV infections increasing in eastern Europe
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Some 131,000 people were newly infected with HIV in Europe and nearby countries in 2012, an 8 percent rise from a year earlier and a worrying reversal of the recent downward trend in AIDS cases in the West.
A report published by the World Health Organization’s European office and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control showed a steady increase in new HIV cases over the past year, but by far the majority of cases were in eastern Europe and central Asia.
The report said that the high and increasing number of AIDS cases was indicative of late HIV diagnosis, low treatment coverage and delayed initiation of life-saving HIV treatment.
Some 76,000 new HIV infections were reported in Russia alone, accounting for more than half the region’s cases.
While reported AIDS cases had been declining steadily in western Europe — dropping 48 percent between 2006 and 2012 — in the eastern part of the WHO’s European region, which includes many former Soviet republics, the number of people newly diagnosed with AIDS increased by 113 percent.
Experts said this increase was closely linked to a lack of preventative measures for people at high risk of contracting the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS.
These include clean needles and syringes for drug users, free condoms and easy access to HIV testing for sex workers and gay men, and early access to treatment with AIDS drugs — known as antiretroviral therapy or ART — for those who test positive.
“Our data show that nearly every second person tested positive for HIV (in the region) — that’s 49 percent — is diagnosed late in the course of their infection, which means they need antiretroviral therapy right away because their immune system is already starting to fail,” said ECDC director Marc Sprenger.
Worldwide, more than 35 million people have HIV — the vast majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
Drugs can keep the virus in check for years, yet even in the relatively wealthy WHO European region, only one in three people with HIV is getting the ART required, the report said.
Michel Kazatchkine, the United Nation’s HIV/AIDS special envoy in eastern Europe, said this month that HIV epidemics are becoming more concentrated in marginalized groups such as sex workers, drug users and gay men, and could defy global attempts to combat AIDS if no progress is made in turning them around.
Sprenger said that to start to do that more effectively “we need to make HIV testing more available across Europe to ensure earlier diagnosis and more effective treatment and care.”
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