EU redoubles efforts to fight AIDS

100,000 new cases of HIV infection annually in Europe. Two million seropositive Europeans, 730,000 of them in the EU alone. These figures for the period from 2001–2007, published by European health commissioner Androulla Vassiliou, “prove that the AIDS epidemic, far from receding, is actually steadily spreading, even in industrialised countries,” observes La Stampa.

Hence the European Commission’s decision to relaunch its information and prevention campaign. Its efforts will chiefly target Eastern Europe, where the problem is more acute: nearly one million Russians, 1.1% of the population, are infected. The object is to encourage HIV testing. In the European Union, 30% of the seropositives don’t even know they’ve contracted the virus and inadvertently continue to infect others. This figure is as high as 70% in some Eastern European countries, such as the Ukraine, Moldova and Russia.