Huge disparities between Western and Eastern Europe in tackling the AIDS virus mean the HIV crisis in the region is far from over, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said today. The U.N. health body said the rapidly rising rates of new HIV infections in countries such as Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia and Latvia meant the region as a whole now had world's the fastest growing epidemic, Reuters reported. "While HIV epidemics in Western Europe are, with some exceptions, generally stabilising, in many countries in Eastern Europe, they rage out of control," Andrew Ball of the WHO's HIV/AIDS department told an international AIDS conference in Vienna. "The rate of increase of new HIV infections in Europe is now the highest in the world." Most of the increase is due to the spread of the virus among injecting drug users in places such as Russia and Ukraine, where addicts are often stigmatised and have limited access to HIV treatment or information. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS is spread in blood, breast milk and through sex and drug users can spread it by sharing used needles. In the WHO's European region, which covers around 50 countries in Eastern and Western Europe, as well Central Asia, there were more than 1.2 million HIV cases by the end 2008, with more than 100,000 new infections in that year. "The AIDS crisis in Europe is not over," said Martin Donoghoe, the WHO's programme manager for HIV/AIDS in the region. He said that while the annual number of new HIV cases was relatively stable at about 20,000 in Western Europe, rates were volatile and increasing in the east, where there were 80,000 new cases in 2008. -- SPA
