EU Urges Action to Avert European AIDS Disaster

On the eve of World AIDS Day, the European Union's Executive Commission today warned that increasing numbers of Europeans are contracting HIV through unprotected sex, and it called for urgent action to avoid a public health crisis. Since 1996, the number of newly reported HIV cases in the EU has doubled, with the Baltic states, which joined the bloc this year, recording the sharpest increases.

The EU's top health official, Markos Kyprianou, also sounded the alarm that young Europeans are especially at risk of contracting HIV. "Teenagers and people in their early 20s are too young to remember the safe sex campaigns of the 1980s and early 1990s… Urgent action is needed to avert a public health disaster," Kyprianou, the European health and consumer protection commissioner, said in a statement. "A big factor behind rising infection rates appears to be that many young people are either unaware of, or choose to ignore, advice about safe sex."

Earlier this year, the commission drafted a strategy backed by EU health ministers to increase the fight against HIV/AIDS. Those plans included investment in HIV/AIDS research and measures to speed up approvals of AIDS drugs.

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