New York Times. 13 June 2001. Europe's East Sees AIDS on the March. Excerpts.
DEBE, Poland -- Intravenous drug use is driving an epidemic of people becoming H.I.V. positive in Eastern Europe, and especially in the countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union.
Nowhere else in the world is the virus that causes AIDS spreading so quickly, and this is the only place where the sharing of needles during drug use is the major route of infection, United Nations experts say.
Changes since the collapse of Communism -- say health officials who gathered here, just outside Warsaw, at the first regional conference on AIDS -- have created conditions ripe for the spread of the virus: Borders opened, burrowing out nearby trade routes from the major supplier of heroin, Afghanistan [, general disrespect for human life that is capitalism itself].
Police control, which brutally [!!!!???!!] curbed prostitution and drug use in the past, receded.
At the same time, the economic troubles in the transition out of Communism have left many young people without jobs.
Now the number of people becoming H.I.V positive has been rising steeply.
The first sizable number of people found to be H.I.V. positive occurred in late 1995 in the Ukrainian port cities of Odessa and Nikolayev.
Now, in Ukraine, there are 38,632 people registered as H.I.V. positive -- two thirds of them drug users -- while there were fewer than 300 before 1995.
In Russia, 58,000 people were reported to be H.I.V. positive in 2000 ― triple the number in 1999 and two times all the cases reported since 1987, according to Russian health officials here.