UN Report: AIDS Spreading Across Eastern Europe and Central Asia

(July 20) -- AIDS is spreading in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, especially among marginalized youth, according to warnings from United Nations advocates at this week's International HIV/AIDS Conference in Vienna.

Rates of HIV in the region, which includes Russia and Georgia, have been climbing for much of the past decade.

The illness afflicted about 1.5 million people in 2008, according to the U.N. That represents a 66 percent increase over seven years.

"Eastern Europe and Central Asia are the only parts of the world where the HIV epidemic remains clearly on the rise," reads the report, published by UNICEF on Monday.

And diagnoses of HIV are anticipated to have increased yet again in 2009. Belarus, most notably, is reporting a 22 percent rise in rates of HIV. In some areas of Russia, rates have surged 400 percent in the past decade.

Experts have also identified key transmission trends. Intravenous drug users, especially those age 15 to 24, are contracting HIV and then passing it onto sexual partners and, eventually, offspring.

HIV-positive pregnancies are twice what they were five years ago.

"Eastern Europe has some of the highest concentrations of HIV among people who inject drugs," Michel Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, told The Associated Press. "This epidemic is inflamed by stigma and punitive laws and won't stop burning until harm reduction and drug substitution are scaled up."

And because 80 percent of the region's sex workers are children, and often struggling with drug problems, local youth are facing a serious risk.

An estimated 1.3 million kids in Eastern Europe and Central Asia are homeless, working in the sex industry, or both.

Widespread social stigma, along with a dearth of preventive services and a lack of medical care, all portend a growing crisis, the report warns.

"Children and adolescents living on the margins of society need access to health and social welfare services, not a harsh dose of disapproval," said Anthony Lake, executive director of UNICEF.

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