Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia - Wednesday November 28, 2001
Clara Ferreira-Marques

An estimated one million people in Russia, other countries of the former Soviet Union and ex-communist states in Eastern Europe will have contracted HIV, the virus which causes AIDS, by the end of 2001, the report said.

"HIV incidence is rising faster in this region than anywhere else in the world," UNAIDS, the U.N. AIDS umbrella group, said in its annual report.

Around the globe, AIDS has become the fourth biggest killer -- with heart disease the first -- the report said, with 40 million people carrying the virus.

"About one-third of those living with AIDS are aged 15-24," the UNAIDS report said. "Most of them do not know they carry the virus. Many millions more know nothing or too little about HIV to protect themselves against it."

Africa continues to be the critical hotspot for the virus, with Africans accounting for almost three-quarters of the 40 million people infected with HIV or AIDS across the globe.

Infection rates are not rising as rapidly in Africa only because so many people have already been struck down.

The HIV virus, which is carried in the blood and other body fluids, is passed on through sexual contact, drug-use involving sharing of needles and transfusions of contaminated blood.

EX-SOVIETS FOCUS OF THIS YEAR'S REPORT

In Russia and the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region, the focus of this year's report, social and economic turmoil have stoked the fast-spreading epidemic, the report said.

"Mass unemployment and economic insecurity beset the region; social and cultural norms are being increasingly liberalized; and public health services are steadily disintegrating," it said. "Given the current evidence, a much larger and more generalized epidemic is a real threat."

Former Soviet Ukraine had the highest prevalence, with one percent of the adult population carrying HIV/AIDS.

But Russia and many of the Central Asian republics have seen spiraling figures with increased use of intravenous drugs.

Russia has 163,000 recorded cases of HIV/AIDS, although experts say the real figure could be up to five times higher.

In Western Europe, as in other high-income countries, AIDS is also on the rise, the report says, as the safe-sex message fades and therapies that prolong lives are mistaken for cures.

"Wide anti-retroviral therapy has encouraged misperceptions that there is now a cure for AIDS and that unprotected sex poses a less daunting risk," the report said.

"High-risk behavior is increasing as a result," it said.

DANGEROUS IGNORANCE

Though campaigns have increased use of condoms, the survey says millions of young African women remain dangerously ignorant about HIV/AIDS. Figures from the U.N. children's charity UNICEF show more than 70 percent of adolescent girls in Somalia have never heard of AIDS.

"AIDS has become the biggest threat to the continent's development and its quest to bring about an African Renaissance," the report said.

"Essential services are being depleted at the same time as state institutions and resources come under greater strain and traditional safety nets disintegrate.

Asian nations like Cambodia and Thailand have drastically lowered HIV rates with large-scale prevention campaigns but the region's heavily populated countries, including China, have had a different experience.

The country's health ministry said 600,000 Chinese were living with HIV/AIDS in 2000. UNAIDS said the total number could well have exceeded one million by late 2001.

The report highlighted the rampant spread of AIDS in China's Henan province, where many villagers became infected after donating blood to unregulated blood banks.

In Latin America, heterosexual sex remains the main source of HIV/AIDS transmission, bucking the trend in industrialized nations, where male homosexual contact remains the main mode of transmission.

Some 1.8 million people live with HIV/AIDS in Latin America and the Caribbean, the second-most affected region in the world. AIDS is a syndrome, a combination of illnesses. HIV attacks the immune system and leaves the body vulnerable to life-threatening diseases, or so-called opportunistic infections, such as tuberculosis.

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