AIDS EPIDEMIC AT LITHUANIAN JAIL: 263 HIV-POSITIVE IN RANDOM CHECK

ALYTUS, Lithuania - Aleksandras Kreslinas received a 10-year sentence for
armed robbery but fears it may amount to a death penalty after becoming
infected with HIV while in Lithuania's Alytus prison.

"I don't know if I'll walk through these gates alive," said the pale
51-year-old, speaking inside the dilapidated Soviet-built jail.

He was among 263 inmates at the prison who have tested positive for HIV
during random checks recently by the state-run AIDS Center, findings that
nearly doubled the official number of HIV cases for all of this former
Soviet Baltic republic of 3.5 million people. Alytus houses about 2,000
inmates.

The results not only traumatized the prisoners, they frightened the nation.
"HIV may spread over the high walls of the doomed prison," a headline in
the newspaper Lietuvos Zinios warned.

Still, tests at Lithuania's other 14 prisons found only 18 cases, the AIDS
Center said. Before the tests, Lithuanian officials had listed 300 HIV
cases, or less than 0.1 percent of the population, the lowest rate in Europe.

However, Irina Savtchenko, an adviser to the United Nations agency devoted
to fighting AIDS, said official statistics don't always reflect the full
scale of a country's AIDS problem since many virus carriers are never tested.

"Usually, HIV epidemics are underground. The epidemic's not seen until the
prevalence in the region becomes very high," she said.

This predominantly Roman Catholic nation won praise after regaining
independence in 1991 for quickly setting up condom-distribution programs
and supplying free needles to drug addicts to stop the most common forms of
spreading the AIDS virus.

But the outbreak at Alytus, which the AIDS Center blamed on intravenous
drug use and shared needles, is seen as a major public- health failure.
Several have been fired, including the warden.

The government initially pledged $50,000 to fight HIV in prisons, but
critics said that wasn't nearly enough. It has been raised to $966,000.

Kreslinas, who has five years left to serve, thinks he was infected while
shooting up heroin with a shared needle.

"Our block had one safe syringe, but jailers took it away, so we had to
borrow another one from a different bloc. It had the virus," he insisted.

He and other inmates said they are victims of overcrowding and inhuman
living conditions.

"Pigs would not eat what we eat," said Antanas Pocevicius, 32, who was
convicted of murder in 1987. "There's no work to be done. Drugs are the
only entertainment."

Even after the test results, Alytus guards have found tennis balls stuffed
with heroin that have been thrown into the compound.

"The attraction to drugs is much stronger than the fear of a deadly
infection," Kreslinas said.