Pubdate: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 Source: Seattle Times (WA) Copyright: 2002 The Seattle Times Company Contact: http://www.seattletimes.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/409 Author: Liudas Dapkus 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. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth