Russia, Ukraine and Estonia are suffering from some of the world's fastest growing HIV/AIDS rates, according to a U.N. Development Program report released yesterday in Moscow.

Between 1.2 million and 1.8 million people in the region were infected with the virus last year compared with an estimated 1 million in 2001, UNDP said, with one out of 100 adults currently carrying the virus (Pierre Celerier, Agence France-Presse/Yahoo! News, Feb. 17). 

"It is already too late to speak of avoiding a crisis," Kalman Mizsei, UNDP's assistant administrator for Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, said in a statement.

The AIDS crisis could have severe economic consequences, according to the U.N. agency.  Health care spending has already increased from 1 percent to 3 percent of the nations' gross domestic product and cut annual GDP growth by 1 percent due to early death of the working-age population.

"Nevertheless, there is still much that governments and civil societies can do to reduce the social, demographic and economic consequences of HIV/AIDS and even reverse the epidemic," said Mizsei.  

Of the 80,000 people requiring treatment for the disease, only 7,000 are receiving it, the report said.  

It called for a "better balance ... between bringing hard-core narcotics traffickers to justice and responding to a public health menace."  HIV/AIDS cases in Russia once involved mainly drug addicts and homosexuals, but disease rates are rising rapidly among the heterosexual population (Judith Ingram, Associated Press/Yahoo! News, Feb. 17).