Eastern European street kids facing 'HIV epidemic'

Growing numbers of vulnerable children across Eastern Europe and Central Asia are at risk of dying from AIDS, with widespread drug use and the sex trade contributing to an "underground HIV epidemic," UNICEF warned on Monday.

The former Soviet states, from Baltic Russia to Tajikistan in Central Asia, and parts of the Balkans remain the only regions of the world where rates of HIV infection continue the rise, according to the UNICEF report, released at an international HIV/AIDS conference in Vienna, Austria.

"Today, street children in the region are dying of AIDS and drug use in much the same way as they died of cold, famine and typhoid in the twentieth century," claims the report, entitled "Blame and Banishment."

Newly diagnosed HIV cases increased by eight percent in Russia in 2009, by 10 percent in Georgia and by 22 percent in Belarus, according to figures released last week by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). Some parts of Russia have experienced a 700 percent increase in rates of infection since 2006, UNICEF says.

Widespread social stigmatization and discrimination associated also threaten to drive the epidemic underground, warned UNICEF's regional HIV/AIDS specialist Nina Ferencic.

"There's an unwillingness to acknowledge that there are young people and minors involved in these behaviors," said Ferencic, a co-author of the report.