TALLINN, Oct 3 (AFP) - Martin, a 36-year-old homosexual, has lived under the shadow of death for 12 years after contracting the deadly HIV virus, a disease that is spreading at an alarming rate in the tiny Baltic state of Estonia.
"I kept my mouth shut and didn't tell anyone about it for years," he says, warning that a climate of intolerance is hampering efforts to contain the disease in this former Soviet republic, which joined the European Union in May.
"Even now many think it's an illness only gays, drug addicts and prostitutes can get."
A UN report six months ago warned that Estonia, Russia and Ukraine were suffering from some of the fastest growing rates of HIV/AIDS in the world, which could dramatically slow their economic recovery.
By the end of September, 4,231 people in Estonia had tested positive for HIV. However, experts say the real amount of infected people is already as high as 10,000.
In such a small country with a population of only 1.4 million people, this would be equivalent in relative terms to one million HIV cases in neighbouring Russia out of its 144 million population.
Ruta Kruuda, director of the Praxis think-tank and one of the authors of a recent HIV report, believes that the government has yet to take the problem seriously.
"The prevention work remains far from sufficient, is not yet valued by policy-makers and threatens to put a heavy burden on the Estonian budget in the coming years when thousands are likely to need financial support for medical treatment," she said.
In Estonia, the spread of HIV has been strongly related to intravenous drug addicts. According to newly published reports there are at least 10,000 such addicts in the country.
But worryingly, it is now affecting the general population. The share of young women who have never used drugs but are infected with HIV has been rapidly increasing in Estonia.
"Most policy-makers seem to think that if slightly fewer new HIV cases will be registered this year compared to last year, all is well. They don't understand that the thousands already infected will not disappear and the problem gets worse all the time." said Kruuda.
For example, most of the money used to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS comes from international organisations, while the Estonian government this year only allocated half of the funds it had promised.
Up until the late 1990s, Estonia had managed to remain an almost HIV-free oasis with less than 100 HIV cases registered.
But in autumn 2000 the best practice case turned into the worst when a rapid increase of HIV cases was registered among drug addicts in Narva, a city in the northeast home to a large ethnic Russian population.
Soon the epidemic spread to the neighbouring region and the area around the capital Tallinn, according to Estonia's most respected HIV prevention expert, Nelli Kalikova.
She says that while among drug addicts injecting heroin almost 98 percent were ethnic Russians in 1997-1998, by now Estonians account for 15 to 20 percent of all drug addicts injecting heroin.
As head of the state-financed Aids Prevention Centre for years Kalikova made almost monthly critical remarks about insufficient financing of HIV and drug addiction prevention work, making herself unpopular with the government.
Last September, the centre was closed by the Ministry of Social Affairs and most of its experts who had gained experience over the years were dismissed over unproven corruption accusations.
Kristi Ruutel, who coordinates anti-AIDS measures at the government's Health Promotion Institute, disagrees with critics that not much is done.
"Among other activities we finance 20 needle-exchange centres to decrease the spread of the virus among injecting drug addicts," she said.
"It's not only the state that should be blamed for the results, everyone needs to take responsibility. After all, when you are left in a dark room in bed it's a personal choice whether your protect yourself," Rüütel told AFP.
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