BERLIN, 24 April 2004 — Fighting the spread of HIV/AIDS in Central and Eastern Europe is the European Union’s new urgent mission — especially with the EU enlargement just a week away.
The urgency the EU is feeling is quite understandable. The ten countries that will join the current 15 EU members on May 1 will bring with them between 17,000 and 30,000 AIDS patients, thus boosting the number of AIDS-infected EU citizens by 15-20 percent to 150,000-180,000, according to the latest data by the European Center for the Epidemiological Monitoring of AIDS (EuroHIV). However, the rate of new infections in the accession countries is threatening to multiply this number many times over: On average, the number of infections there has climbed four-fold in the last five years, while remaining more or less steady in the current EU. But these averages hide the fact that newly infected cases in Europe’s Baltic corner — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — have zoomed fifty times higher between 1996 and 2002.
In Estonia alone, the number of people who got infected by AIDS soared by more than 110 times over these five years.
So it wasn’t surprising that health and development ministers from 55 countries met in Dublin in February and set themselves and their governments tough practical targets and tight time schedules to combat HIV AIDS in the accession countries.
But can the EU block stop such an inexorable rise and reverse the trend?
Not a chance, say EU officials. They admit that because the EU lacks the administrative tools and the legal power to do anything on this issue in the region, it has to wait for the affected countries to take the initiative to cope with the problem and to ask the EU for help. “The EU has no legal mechanisms or authority to intervene into national health policies or their implementation,” explains Thorsten Munch, the spokesman of the EU Directorate General for Health and Consumer Protection. “The EU Treaty states clearly these matters are strictly for national governments to decide on.”Yet such a position is just an attempt to avoid facing the issue, charges UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot. “Since no one is legally responsible in Brussels, no one wants to do anything about it,” he fumes.
Piot says he’s making an all-out effort to convince Brussels to appoint someone exclusively responsible for coordinating an EU-wide anti-AIDS campaign.“By the end of this year, when a new commission has been appointed, they should have someone dealing with this problem alone.”
The Health Directorate’s Munch agrees the spreading of HIV/AIDS infections is endangering the health and security of EU citizens and an epidemic might undermine the EU economy but insists the Dublin Declaration is the proof the EU is taking the matter seriously. “We’re also thinking what we can do about the legal issue,” he says, declining to elaborate.
An EU AIDS czsar would have a mammoth task to accomplish. Not only does the EU lack a common policy on combatting AIDS — an anti-AIDS directive — it has no standards on AIDS testing, no uniform approach to AIDS education, prevention and treatment, no standard requirements for health insurance companies to provide AIDS-related coverage and no legal basis ensuring that AIDS patients within the EU have equal access to retroviral drugs.
