The regular use of the word virus these days has to do with programs that infect computers. The deadly biological versions are either old hat, or forgotten about once the latest media fuelled “panicdemic” ebbs. SARS is gone, avian flu elsewhere, for now.
Russia seems to be central to the spread of both kinds of viruses - the Mydoom computer virus that infected computers by emails in record numbers in January has been traced as to having originated there. Oddly, or perhaps not, the people who developed the Mydoom “vaccine” are also Russian.
AIDS, of course, is the old hat virus, around for decades. These days, the general populace seems to dismiss AIDS. It either wages its viral terror in far away places such as sub-Saharan Africa and the Carribean, or attacks certain promiscuous or addicted groups. Not us. No ma’am.
Years ago, when it was still politically correct to use black humour, the line was, that the most difficult part of receiving an HIV positive diagnosis was convincing your friends and social group that you were Haitian. The virus spread fastest among that ethnic group; others, of course, were homosexuals and intravenous drug users.
In Estonia today, the difficulty must be in convincing your friends that you are Russian. The goverment certainly - at least openly - is not treating the rise of HIV cases in Estonia with the necessary public degree of concern.
The U.N. Development Program released its new report on HIV and AIDS
in the CIS and Eastern Europe on Tuesday. It estimated that about one in
every 100 adults in Russia, Ukraine and Estonia carried the virus, and
pointed out that comparable infection rates in other countries had led
to the failure of containment efforts. That 1% rate means that it is still a “social disease” - affecting primarily prisoners, druggies and prostitutes. As is well known, it can go beyond these boundaries, spill into the general population. And therein lies the threat.
Consider now, that when the UN stated baldly that the spread of AIDS has reached crisis proportions that the Estonian print media was quite complacent - no reports, articles anywhere near the magnitude such as those that appeared in the West. In fact, the hot news in Estonia’s print media this week was the revelation that police had busted an international prostitution ring - the dispatch centre operated out of an apartment in Tallinn’s Lasnamäe district. (Known, of course, for the high percentage of ethnic Russians living there) A Finnish national is the alleged mastermind, three Latvians have also been arrested, but no word on the nationality of the prostitutes other than “Baltic” and Russian. In contrast, Canada’s most PC newspaper, the Liberal “Toronto Star” prominently addressed the concerns raised in the UN report on the day after its release.
It seems that the unofficial view is to suggest that most “sex-trade workers” (what an odious PC term!) are not Estonian nationals. Without open statistics, who can prove them wrong? They may be African or Haitian for all we know. The official view? Not available.
While Russia is slammed by the UN for complaceny and low spending on the crisis - Russia only spends 5 roubles yearly per capita on AIDS prevention and research, approximately the price of a pack of bad Russian cigarettes, - Estonia and Latvia were also singled out.
UN officials noted that the high HIV infection rate in Estonia showed that economic growth did not necessarily mean coping, much less beating the epidemic.
One wire report cited an official of Estonia’s Social Welfare Ministry, as saying the even the HIV stats are incomplete. AP reported that in Estonia, 3,621 people are officially registered as HIV-positive, according to the Ministry, but spokeswoman Katrin Pargmae [sic] said unofficial estimates were twice as high.
A visit to the Social Welfare Ministry web site seemed to be in order. And - no mention of the UN report. To their credit, intravenous drug use and HIV rate is addressed in a report with the same release date as the UN AIDS report, February 17th. Yet, even this is suspect, because it uses data from 2002. In 2002, the number of new HIV positive persons among drug users dropped.
The
www.sm.ee site reports that the International experts from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction gave a positive assessment to Estonia's national strategy for drug addiction prevention. Emphasis is placed on the fact that any strategy dealing with this issue needs to take the long term view - 3 and 4 year programs are inadequate.
This should also be the case with sexually transmitted HIV. As noted, the 1% threshold is precarious. The UN has noted that AIDS is already a bigger epidemic than the Black Death - and the ramifications for a small nation can be magnified.
Never mind the social costs. The report warns that GDP growth could decrease by up to 1 percent due to a higher mortality rate in the labor force, while increased health expenditures for people living with AIDS could absorb up to 3 percentage points of gross domestic product.
That same 3%, by the way, is all that what the eurozone Stability Pact allows for nations to have as a budget deficit. It is not a small sum by any stretch.
While rise of HIV infection rates in Estonia is not new, a column on this very issue appeared in this space a year ago, expressing the same concerns, governmental attitudes need to be addressed. We know only too well, that sex is casually addressed in Estonia, the print media is liberal with words and pictures. North America is also becoming too in-your-face with sexual imagery, advertising everywhere. It need not be a problem, if education, HIV prevention programs are in place, social support systems established. After all, safe sex only makes sense. If Estonia is indeed making headway with the drug addiction problem, then the spread of HIV in Estonia can only be directly attributable to sexual activity. A small country, concerned about low birth rates can’t afford to be complacent about this crisis. Parts, Pomerants and newspaper publishers have a responsibility to the nation to deal openly with what may truly become an issue years down the road, and come up with a viable plan, not only of public education, but of prevention with a capital P.
