Finding of High Number of HIV Cases Among Prison Inmates Unsettles Lithuania

Aleksandras Kreslinas, serving a 10-year sentence for armed robbery, is among 263 inmates in Lithuania's Alytus prison who tested positive for HIV during recent random checks by the state-run AIDS Center. The findings nearly doubled the official number of HIV cases for this country of 3.5 million people. Kreslinas, who has five years left to serve, thinks he was infected while injecting heroin with a shared needle.

The worry is that the results at Alytus may indicate HIV is far more prevalent in the country than imagined, said Irina Savtchenko, an advisor to UNAIDS. "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.

Still, tests at Lithuania's 14 other 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.

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 spread of HIV. Now 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.

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 $50,000 to fight HIV in prisons, but critics said that was not nearly enough. Under pressure, Lithuania has raised total funding to $966,000.

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