Generation at Risk as AIDS Peril Advances in Former Soviet Bloc

From Estonia to Kazakhstan, unsafe sex and rampant IV drug use in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc are exposing teenagers and young adults to HIV/AIDS, UNAIDS and the World Health Organization said Tuesday. In the region, the UN estimated about 230,000 people became infected with HIV in 2003, raising the region's HIV/AIDS cases to 1.5 million. About 30,000 people there will die from AIDS this year.

An estimated 1 million people ages 15-49 have HIV in Russia. A Moscow survey of boys ages 15-18 cited in the UN report found that 12 percent had used injection drugs. In St. Petersburg, 30 percent of drug users were male teenagers. And while females comprised 24 percent of new HIV diagnoses in 2001, they represented 33 percent in 2002. Consequently, there was a sharp rise in mother-to-baby transmission.

HIV epidemics continue spreading in Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. "Driving these epidemics is widespread risky behavior -- injecting drug use and unsafe sex -- among young people," the report said.

"Extraordinarily large numbers of young people regularly or intermittently engage in injecting drug use, and this is reflected in increasing HIV prevalence among drug users throughout the former Soviet Union," said the report. "Condom use is generally low among young people, including those at highest risk of HIV transmission in Eastern Europe and Central Asia."

In Ukraine, a quarter of people diagnosed with HIV are younger than 20; in Belarus, 60 percent are ages 15-24; and in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, more than 70 percent are under 30. More than 80 percent of those HIV-infected in the region are under 30 years old, the report noted.

Poland's HIV infection rate has stabilized since the mid-1990s, as had happened in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia since the late 1990s. However, in the former war-torn Balkans, drug injecting and risky sex have increased.

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