Aids Rife in Ex-soviet States

HIV/Aids is spreading faster in the countries of the former Soviet Union than anywhere else on earth, and precious time in combatting the infection has been lost because the scale of the crisis has been underestimated, a United Nations report says today.

Young people in central and eastern Europe are being caught up in the epidemic, which is spreading from intravenous drug users into the heterosexual population. "The implications for the re gion's economic growth and social stability - which are so dependent on its young people - are alarming," said Carol Bellamy, executive director of Unicef, which compiled the report.

"HIV/Aids has a young face in this region. Young people account for most new infections and their low levels of HIV awareness, combined with increasingly risky behaviour, herald a new catastrophe ... Without immediate and radical action, there is little to stop the spread of the disease."

About 1 million people are infected so far, but newly registered cases increased more than five-fold between 1998 and 2001. Most cases - 90% - are in Russia and Ukraine, but infections are increasing fastest in Estonia, where one in every 1,000 people was infected in 2001.

The collapse of the communist regime gave young people greater sexual freedom - and greater dislocation and despair. Many are neither in education nor have jobs.

There has been an exponential growth in substance abuse and the new sexual liberation means that HIV is moving into the mainstream.

In Belarus, 8% of new infections in 1996 were attributed to sexual transmission. By the first half of 2001, that figure had risen to 32%.