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Warsaw (pte018/28.03.2003/11:40) - Despite Poland's success in treating HIV/AIDS, the low level of public knowledge of the disease is encouraging complacency and increasing the risk of a fresh outbreak from Eastern Europe, according to a report from the country's local UN Development Programme (UNDP) http://www.undp.org.pl .
A survey commissioned by the report found that 40 per cent of those questioned believed HIV/AIDS can be contracted from insect bites, 29.6 per cent feared infection in public toilets and baths, and 26 per cent claimed they could catch the disease from cutlery used by HIV carriers.
Anna Marzac-Buguslawska, director of Poland's National Aids Centre http://www.aids.gov.pl , told Reuters Health: "It has the limitation of being a small survey but there is clearly a big problem".
The ignorance influences attitudes towards those with HIV/AIDS. According to the report, more than a half of Polish employers would rather take on people with cancer or cardiac problems than HIV carriers.
"We have a very good record of treating sufferers, perhaps better than any country in Central and Eastern Europe, but only eight percent of the budget for the disease goes on education and other prevention methods," Marzac-Buguslawska said.
A co-author of the report, Henryk Banazac, told Reuters Health that public knowledge had deteriorated over recent years, and was "frighteningly low".
The report points out that Poland is on the edge of a region with very serious problems with the disease, that the course of the epidemic is unpredictable, and that Latvia for example was also a country of low prevalence until it was taken by surprise when it recently discovered a sudden increase in HIV-infections.
Last year the World Health Organization http://www.who.int revealed that Eastern Europe and Central Asia had the world's fastest growing HIV/AIDS epidemic with 1.2 million sufferers, a fifth of whom had caught the disease in 2002.
"Not only must we be vigilant to prevent infection, but we must also broaden public awareness of the dignity and human rights of HIV-infected persons, and it is our duty to ensure that there is no discrimination against them," said Colin Glennie, head of the UNDP in Poland.
Marzac-Buguslawska added that there were already signs of the problem on both sides of the country's eastern borders. "We have to be alert to the high rate of sexually transmitted diseases in these areas, because it's a good marker for HIV/AIDS," she said.
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