Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Associated Press - Wednesday August 21, 2002
Liudas Dapkus, Associated Press Writer
"I don't know if I'll walk through these gates alive," said the pale and unshaven 51-year-old, speaking inside the dilapidated Soviet-built jail.
He was among 263 inmates at the prison who have tested positive for HIV during random checks recently by the state-run AIDS Center, findings that nearly doubled the official number of HIV cases for all of this former Soviet Baltic republic of 3.5 million people.
The results not only traumatized the prisoners, they frightened the nation. "HIV may spread over the high walls of the doomed prison," a headline in the newspaper Lietuvos Zinios warned.
The real worry is that the results may indicate HIV is far more prevalent in the country than imagined, said Irina Savtchenko, an adviser to the United Nations agency devoted to fighting AIDS.
"I suppose it's possible it might not be so in this case, but prisons usually do reflect the situation in a country as a whole," she said in a telephone interview from UNAIDS headquarters in Geneva.
Still, tests at Lithuania's other 14 prisons found only 18 cases, the AIDS Center said.
Before the tests, Lithuanian officials had listed just 300 HIV cases, or less than 0.1 percent of the population, the lowest rate in Europe. Savtchenko said official statistics don't always reflect the full scale of a country's AIDS problem since many virus carriers are never tested.
"Usually, HIV epidemics are underground. The epidemic's not seen until the prevalence in the region becomes very high," she said.
This predominantly Roman Catholic nation won praise after regaining independence in 1991 for quickly setting up condom distribution programs and supplying free needles to drug addicts to stop the most common forms of spreading the AIDS virus.
But the outbreak at Alytus, which the AIDS Center blamed on intravenous drug use and shared needles, is seen as a major public health failure. Several prison officials have been fired, including the warden. Many people called for Justice Minister Vytautas Markevicius to resign, though he managed to keep his post.
Kreslinas, who has five years left to serve, believes he was infected while shooting up heroin with a shared needle.
"Our block had one safe syringe but jailers took it away, so we had to borrow another one from a different bloc. It had the virus," he insisted.
He and other inmates said they are victims of overcrowding and inhuman living conditions, problems said to be prevalent at all of Lithuania's prisons, which house 11,700 convicts.
"Pigs would not eat what we eat," said Antanas Pocevicius, 32, who was convicted of murder in 1987. "There's no work to be done. Drugs are the only entertainment."
Pocevicius, due to be released this year, wouldn't say if he tested positive for HIV.
Alytus, which is one of Lithuania's three high-security prisons, was built in 1957 to house 1,300 inmates but holds about 2,000 in run-down buildings.
Inmates at several prisons staged a weeklong hunger strike after the HIV test findings were announced, drawing a government promise to improve conditions and to build a center for drug addicts and HIV-positive inmates.
The government initially pledged just 200,000 litas (dlrs 50,000) to fight HIV in prisons, but critics said that wasn't nearly enough. Under pressure, it has raised total funding to 3.4 million litas (dlrs 966,000).
Savtchenko, the U.N. official, said that even if the HIV outbreak is isolated to the Alytus prison, the infected convicts will still be a problem for the general population when freed.
"If their behavior doesn't change - if they take drugs and have unprotected sex - they'll become the source of infection for others," she said, pointing to a rise in intravenous drug use in Lithuania.
Even after the test results, Alytus guards have come across tennis balls stuffed with heroin that have been thrown into the compound over the prison's 5-meter-high (16.4-foot-high) walls.
"The attraction to drugs is much stronger than the fear of a deadly infection," Kreslinas said.
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