FINDING OF HIGH NUMBER OF HIV CASES AMONG PRISON INMATES UNSETTLES LITHUANIA

ALYTUS, Lithuania - Aleksandras Kreslinas landed 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 and
unshaven 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.

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.

The real worry is that the results may indicate HIV is far more prevalent
in the country than imagined, said Irina Savtchenko, an adviser to the
United Nations agency devoted to fighting AIDS.

"I suppose it's possible it might not be so in this case, but prisons
usually do reflect the situation in a country as a whole," she said in a
telephone interview from UNAIDS headquarters in Geneva.

Still, tests at Lithuania's other 14 prisons found only 18 cases, the AIDS
Center said.

Before the tests, Lithuanian officials had listed just 300 HIV cases, or
less than 0.1 percent of the population, the lowest rate in Europe.

Savtchenko 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 prison officials have been fired, including the warden. Many people
called for Justice Minister Vytautas Markevicius to resign, though he
managed to keep his post.

Kreslinas, who has five years left to serve, believes 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, problems said to be prevalent at all of Lithuania's
prisons, which house 11,700 convicts.

"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."

Pocevicius, due to be released this year, wouldn't say if he tested
positive for HIV.

Alytus, which is one of Lithuania's three high-security prisons, was built
in 1957 to house 1,300 inmates but holds about 2,000 in run-down buildings.

Inmates at several prisons staged a weeklong hunger strike after the HIV
test findings were announced, drawing a government promise to improve
conditions and to build a center for drug addicts and HIV- positive inmates.

The government initially pledged just $50,000 to fight HIV in prisons, but
critics said that wasn't nearly enough. Under pressure, it has raised total
funding to $966,000.

Savtchenko, the U.N. official, said that even if the HIV outbreak is
isolated to the Alytus prison, the infected convicts will still be a
problem for the general population when freed.

"If their behavior doesn't change if they take drugs and have unprotected
sex they'll become the source of infection for others," she said, pointing
to a rise in intravenous drug use in Lithuania.

Even after the test results, Alytus guards have come across tennis balls
stuffed with heroin that have been thrown into the compound over the
prison's 16 1/2-foot-high walls.

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