NEW DRUG METHOD IN RUSSIA MAY BE BEHIND AIDS SPREAD

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) One reason the AIDS epidemic may be spreading rapidly in
Eastern Europe and the exSoviet Union is that some producers of illicit
drugs have been putting blood into drugs to test their quality, U.N.
experts said Thursday.

The heroinlike products, which may contain blood infected with the lethal
HIV virus, are injected by the unsuspecting user who becomes infected with
HIV even if he uses a sterile needle.

Dr. Bernhard Schwartlaender, senior epidemiologist at the Joint U.N.
Program on HIV/AIDS, and Dr. David Heymann, head of the emerging diseases
division at the World Health Organization (WHO), expressed alarm over the
new drug production method.

It was reported at a meeting in Geneva a few weeks ago by Vadim Pokrovsky,
chief of laboratory for AIDS epidemiology and prevention at Russia's AIDS
Center, according to the experts.

They feared it would be difficult to reach underground drug producers in
former East bloc states to educate them about the danger in using blood to
make heroin and heroinlike products.

``It was a shocking new phenomenon for us, because our nice messages might
not be that valid for this part of the world,'' Schwartlaender told a news
conference. ``This is a very recent finding.''

He later told Reuters: ``This may explain why HIV is spreading dramatically
in some communities. It holds true not only for Russia, but the Ukraine and
other parts of the region.''

The two experts revealed the disturbing news a day after the Genevabased
AIDS program issued its annual figures showing that 16,000 people are
infected worldwide each day with HIV which causes Acquired Immune
Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

More than 30 million adults and children have the infection and the number
could soar to 40 million by the year 2000, it said. An estimated 2.3
million people died of AIDS last year.

The report also said that drug injection was behind the ``dramatic surge''
in HIV infection in several Eastern European nations, accounting for the
majority of the 100,000 new infections estimated to have occurred in the
region this year.

Russian health officials have told the U.N. AIDS program that there about
350,000 regular drug users in the country, many of them sharing injecting
material, according to the report. The exact number of HIV infections and
AIDS cases was not available.

In Ukraine, where about 70 percent of infections have been in drug users
over the last three years, 25,000 cases of HIV infection have been reported
so far. Half have been in 1997.

Schwartlaender, who is German, said: ``The epidemic in Eastern Europe is
very recent and hits an area in the world that is not well prepared to
monitor the problem or cope with it.''

``What happens is that because of very limited resources to produce the
drugs there, sometimes they test the quality of the drugs by putting in
blood. It is a very simple test. If the blood doesn't go bad basically,
then you can use the drug. If there are too many acids in there, the blood
would coagulate and then you couldn't use or sell it (the drug),'' he added.

``By doing that...you actually infect the drugs that are then sold. This
could be one of the explanations why in these little pockets it's really
spreading dramatically.''