AIDS - Europe's New Plague
The region which brought you the Black Death, communism and
all-pervasive kleptocracy now presents: AIDS. The process of
enlargement to the east may, unwittingly, open the European
Union's doors to the two scourges of inordinately brutal
organized crime and exceptionally lethal disease. As Newsweek
noted, the threat is greater and nearer than any hysterically
conjured act of terrorism.
The effective measure of quarantining the HIV-positive
inhabitants of the blighted region to prevent a calamity of
medieval proportions is proscribed by the latest vintage of
politically correct liberalism. The West can only help them
improve detection and treatment. But this is a tall order.
East European medicine harbors fantastic pretensions to west
European standards of quality and service. But it is encumbered
with African financing, German bureaucracy and Vietnamese
infrastructure. Since the implosion of communism in 1989,
deteriorating incomes, widespread unemployment and social
disintegration plunged people into abject poverty, making it
impossible to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
A report published in September by the European regional office
of the World Health Organization (WHO) pegs at 46 the percentage
of the general population in the countries of the former
communist bloc living on less than $4 a day - close to 170
million people. Crumbling and desperately underfunded healthcare
systems, ridden by corruption and cronyism, ceased to provide
even the appearance of rudimentary health services.
The number of women who die at - ever rarer - childbirth
skyrocketed. Transition has trimmed Russian life expectancy by
well over a decade to 59, lower than in India. People lead
brutish and nasty lives only to expire in their prime, often
inebriated. In the republics of former Yugoslavia, respiratory
and digestive tract diseases run amok. Stress and pollution
conspire to reap a grim harvest throughout the wastelands of
eastern Europe. The rate of Tuberculosis in Romania exceeds that
of sub-Saharan Africa.
UNAIDS and WHO have just published their AIDS Epidemic Update.
It states unequivocally: "In Eastern Europe and Central Asia,
the number of people living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus -
HIV - in 2002 stood at 1.2 million. HIV/AIDS is expanding
rapidly in the Baltic States, the Russian Federation and several
Central Asian republics."
The figures are grossly understated - and distorting. The
epidemic in eastern Europe and central Asia - virtually on the
European Union's doorstep - is accelerating and its growth rate
has surpassed sub-Saharan Africa's. One fifth of all people in
this region infected by HIV contracted the virus in the
preceding 12 months. UNAIDS says: "The unfortunate distinction
of having the world