PARIS, July 6 (AFP) - The countries of the former Soviet bloc are experiencing the world's fast-growing AIDS epidemic, yet many remain pitifully unready to face the peril, the UN agency UNAIDS warned on Tuesday.
Across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, stigma, ignorance and political indifference about AIDS are deeply entrenched, creating fertile conditions for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to spread, it said in its 2004 update on the global AIDS crisis.
"Relatively new epidemics in East Asia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia are spreading fast," the report said.
"Despite the overwhelming evidence that AIDS is everywhere, the impulse to say AIDS is only a problem 'somewhere else' is strong.
"In such a climate, people who are stigmatised and live on the margins of society, such as injecting drug users and men who have sex with men, are often badly served by prevention programmes. In some countries, their care and support are systematically ignored."
UNAIDS estimated that from the former Iron Curtain to the border with China, 1.3 million people were living with AIDS or HIV from the end of last year, an increase of around 360,000 over 2002.
That amounts to 0.6 percent of the adult population -- a 50 percent rise in just two years, the UNAIDS' 2004 update on the global AIDS epidemic said.
At the end of 2001, the infection rate among adults, a category aged 15-49, was only 0.4 percent.
A staggeringly high proportion of people with HIV are young.
More than 80 percent of cases, compared with only 30 percent in North America and Western Europe, are aged under 30, and young infected men are twice as numerous as young infected women.
Ukraine, with 1.4 percent infection rate among adults, followed by Estonia and Russia, each with 1.1 percent, are the three worst-hit, followed by Latvia (0.6 percent).
The other countries in this region have infection rates of 0.2 percent of their adult population or less, but UNAIDS says there is no room for complacency. HIV numbers are continuing to rise in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Moldova.
The main driving force for the epidemic is injecting drug use, "an activity that has spread explosively in the years of turbulent change since the demise of the Soviet regime," UNAIDS said.
But, as has been seen in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, the infection in worst-hit countries is starting to spread away from drug addicts and into the main population.
Russia alone counts for around 860,000 of the estimated 1.3 million HIV infections. It reported 56,630 new registered cases in 2000, but the annual tally fell in 2002 and 2003, possibly because of changes in HIV-testing among drug users.
UNAIDS placed the spotlight on several hotspots in the Russian epidemic, voicing worries about increases in HIV infection among pregnant women, the prison population and in the northern city of St. Petersburg.
In an interview with AFP, UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot said that with the exception of Ukraine, AIDS "is not on the radar screen or the agenda of the top leadership in Eastern Europe."
"It may have to do with the fact that (locally) it's largely an epidemic driven by injecting drug use, and that's not a popular cause in any country. Also, it's still very much treated as a health issue only, and it's not perceived as threatening economic development or stability."
Among the few bright spots in this dark picture, UNAIDS singled out Romania, praising it for promoting antiretroviral drug distribution to all those deemed in need.
The spark for providing universal access was the terrible plight of the country's AIDS-infected children: more than 10,000 children became infected with HIV between 1987 and 1991 as a result of unscreened blood transfusion and contaminated syringes.
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