ALMATY, June 28 (AFP) - A senior World Bank official warned the former Soviet Central Asian republics on Monday that they must face up to the impending threat of AIDS or face "unimaginable" consequences.
"Now is the time for the Central Asian countries to come together to fight HIV/AIDS -- this is not an issue of whether Central Asia fights against AIDS but when," Dennis De Tray, the World Bank's Central Asia director, said.
De Tray issued the warning as officials from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan gathered in the Kazakh commercial centre Almaty for the launch of a 25-million-dollar (21-million-euro) programme aimed at jointly combatting the disease.
Isolated Turkmenistan was absent from Monday's meeting, having claimed that it has only two HIV carriers.
Eighty percent of the funding for the new programme is to come from the World Bank with the rest from Japan, Britain and the region's governments.
Central Asia "can begin (the) fight now and it will be difficult and expensive, or it can wait five or 10 years ... and it will be unimaginably expensive, not simply for governments but in terms of lives and lost development," De Tray told reporters.
His comments followed warnings that the countries of the former Soviet Union are experiencing a faster HIV infection rate than sub-Saharan Africa.
In total the Central Asian republics have seen a 16-fold increase in their total number of registered HIV cases from 500 in 2000 to 8,000 this year, but experts estimate the actual number of cases in the region to be as high as 90,000, De Tray said.
By the end of 2006 the total number of people infected with HIV in the five countries could reach 1.5 million, out of a total population of 58 million, De Tray added.
Central Asia's HIV boom is mainly attributable to the flow of Afghan-produced heroin through the region to Russia and the West. In the next few years the disease is expected to be sexually transmitted to the wider population.
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