EASTERN EUROPEAN STREET KIDS FACING ‘HIV EPIDEMIC’
Baku, July 21 (AZERTAC). Growing numbers of vulnerable children across Eastern Europe and Central Asia are at risk of dying from AIDS, with widespread drug use and the sex trade contributing to an “underground HIV epidemic,” UNICEF warned on Monday.
The former Soviet states, from Baltic Russia to Tajikistan in Central Asia, and parts of the Balkans remain the only regions of the world where rates of HIV infection continue the rise, according to the UNICEF report, released at an international HIV/AIDS conference in Vienna, Austria.
“Today, street children in the region are dying of AIDS and drug use in much the same way as they died of cold, famine and typhoid in the twentieth century,” claims the report, entitled “Blame and Banishment.”
Newly diagnosed HIV cases increased by eight percent in Russia in 2009, by 10 percent in Georgia and by 22 percent in Belarus, according to figures released last week by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). Some parts of Russia have experienced a 700 percent increase in rates of infection since 2006, UNICEF says.
Widespread social stigmatization and discrimination associated also threaten to drive the epidemic underground, warned UNICEF`s regional HIV/AIDS specialist Nina Ferencic.
UNICEF said that street children and children in poverty were particularly at risk with a third of new cases of HIV infection affecting the 15-24 age group. Recent research suggests up to 40 percent of homeless children in the Russian city of St. Petersburg could be infected with the virus.
For many, that also means exposure to drugs with around 3.7 million people in the region estimated to inject drugs -- a quarter of the world`s total. One in four of those are estimated to be HIV positive. Many vulnerable adolescents also end up working in the sex trade, further exposing themselves to the risk of contracting HIV.
UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake said that authorities needed to establish “non-judgmental, friendly services” to address the needs of marginalized adolescents -- such as 100 youth centers established in Russia to provide reproductive and sexual health services, counseling and psychological support.
