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Aids goes East
Interview with Vittorio Agnoletto at the World Conference on Aids being held in Vienna until July 23
The main issues on the table in Vienna this week are: the decrease in AIDS aid, wasteful use of funds, the spread of the virus in central Europe and central Asia, the need to start therapy earlier. 20 thousand delegates from around the world met in Vienna on July 18, inaugurating the 18th international AIDS conference. Among them, the ex MEP Vittorio Agnoletto, well known in Italy for founding LILA, the Italian league against AIDS.
What’s new in Vienna?
First of all lets start from reality, which isn’t such a nice place to be. According to UNAIDS’ latest data, there are 33.5 million people with HIV, 22.5 million of whom live in Sub-Saharian Africa. In 2009 2 million people died of AIDS and 75% of deaths happened on the African continent.
Vienna was specifically chosen as meeting place for the conference: the Austrian capital is, historically, a meeting place between East and West. Now, over the course of the last couple of years, central-eastern Europe and central Asia are the areas of the world in which the virus is spreading most rapidly, especially among young people.
How?
Mainly through syringe sharing, meaning that drug users are the most hit. The first night’s plenary discussed this at length and governments were asked to modify their HIV prevention strategies. Within the European Union, there are two completely different spreading scenarios: in western Europe the spread of HIV is fairly stable, in Italy, for example, there are about 4 thousand new infections every year. In eastern Europe the situation has become a lot more serious. These countries don’t have access to the same number of therapies as do the countries of the west, as an example taken from Ukraine goes to show. Here, the Ukrainian government has set up specific policies aimed at reducing the number of drug users and the number of HIV positive people has drastically reduced. This is an important signal that we are sending out to the delegates of European countries, especially those from eastern Europe.
