The territory that brought you the Black Death, communism and the all-pervasive kleptocracy now presents: AIDS. The process of enlarging to the east may, unwittingly, open the doors of the European Union to two specter of extremely brutal organized crime and a very deadly disease. As Newsweek explained, the threat is bigger and closer than the hysterical conjured act of terrorism.
Evolutionary view of the AIDS process
The measure of effectively quarantining HIV-positive populations from disease-stricken areas to prevent catastrophe. Medieval proportions are hailed by the latest vintage of politically correct liberalism. The West can only help them improve detection and treatment. But this is a tall order.
Eastern European medicine holds fantastic pretensions for Western European quality and service standards. But burdened with African financing, German bureaucracy and Vietnamese infrastructure. Since the explosion of communism in 1989, deteriorating incomes, widespread unemployment and social disintegration have plunged people into abject poverty, making it impossible to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
A report published in September by the European regional office of the World Health Organization (WHO) pegged 46 percent of the general population in former communist bloc countries living on less than $ 4 a day – close to 170 million people. A collapsed and severely underfunded healthcare system, ridden by corruption and cronyism, ceased to give even the appearance of rudimentary healthcare.
Plagues, History, and AIDS
The number of women dying in – ever rarer – childbirth has skyrocketed. The transition has cut Russia’s life expectancy by more than a decade to 59, lower than in India. People lead brutal and evil lives only to expire at their prime, often getting drunk. In the republics of the former Yugoslavia, diseases of the respiratory and digestive tracts went berserk. Stress and pollution conspire to reap grim harvests across eastern European deserts. Tuberculosis rates in Romania exceed sub-Saharan Africa.
UNAIDS and WHO have just published their AIDS Epidemic Update. It states emphatically: “In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the number of people living with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus – HIV – in 2002 reached 1.2 million. HIV / AIDS is growing rapidly in the Baltic States, the Russian Federation and several Central Asian republics. ”
The figures are grossly understatement – and distorted. Epidemics in eastern Europe and Central Asia – almost at the doorstep of the European Union – are accelerating and growth rates have surpassed sub-Saharan Africa. One-fifth of all people in the region infected with HIV contracted the virus in the previous 12 months. UNAIDS said: “The unfortunate difference of having the world’s fastest growing HIV / AIDS epidemic still belongs to Eastern Europe and Central Asia.”
In the last eight years, AIDS has suddenly been “discovered” in 30 major cities of Russia and in 86 of its 89 territories. Four-fifths of all infections in the Commonwealth of Independent States – the rubble left by the collapse of the Soviet Union – were among people younger than 29. As of July this year, new HIV cases jumped to 200,000 – up from 11,000 in December 1998 .
At St. Petersburg, their numbers were multiplied by a staggering 250-fold since 1996 to 10,000 new instances diagnosed in 2001. Most of these cases were associated with intravenous drug use. But, according to Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, 400 infected women gave birth at a hospital in St. Petersburg. Petersburg in the first nine months of 2002 – compared to 149 so far last year. About a third of neonates test HIV-positive within 24 months. This disease has been damaged.
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