Europe's prisons are in the grip of an Aids epidemic which is being spread by homosexual sex and drug abuse. Prison officials and health experts from sixteen European countries have been meeting in Warsaw to discuss the epidemic. Jonathan Fryer reports on the origins of the problem - and what is being done to counter it.

The Warsaw seminar on HIV-infection and Aids in Europe's jails is being held in the wake of a shock report from the United Nations' Aids agency last Friday.

It found nearly a quarter of the prisoners in Spanish jails are infected and a fifth of those in Ireland's, with worrying rises noted in several other EU countries.

But it is not a problem limited to western European countries and may in fact be worse east of the old Iron Curtain.

There is an Aids explosion in the prison system in some central eastern European countries, as Dr Stuart Kingma of the World Health Organization explains.

"The social disruption and the increased mobility of people and the increasing drug-trafficking in and through the eastern European countries has brought many risk factors into the population.

"These primarily drug-related convictions are bringing the HIV-Aids virus, as well as other diseases, into the prison system."

According to the World Health Organisation, once introduced into male prisons, in particular, the HIV-virus can spread rapidly, through communal drug abuse and unprotected sex between inmates.

It took several years for countries like Britain to accept such unpalatable facts and in parts of eastern Europe the authorities' reluctance to face up to reality still persists, says Dr Kingma.

Enlightened prison governors in many parts of the world have now introduce risk-reduction methods, such as making available clean syringes and condoms, but this can have an unfortunate reaction.

Earlier this year several inmates were killed when prisoners at a jail in Jamaica went on the rampage, singling out homosexuals after the governor began handing out condoms to inmates and guards, who also took grave offence.

Some European politicians claim distributing clean hypodermic needles or condoms effectively incites them to take drugs or engage in homosexual practices but health officials brushes their objections aside as an irrelevance.

Unreliable official records make it hard to gauge the scale of the problem but Poland has broadly followed the European trend.

The WHO is also anxious that the problem of Aids in prisons is not seen in isolation.

Not only can convicted criminals bring the HIV virus into jail with them but prisoners who have served their sentences can also take the disease out into the wider community with them, as Kasia Marinowksa of Poland's UN AIDS programme, is well aware.

She says: "An issue which is of great concern to us is: what happens if a person who is HIV-infected is released from prison?

"If someone has been in prison for five or six years, obviously, when they come out, they want to pursue their lives and do new things.

"From the viewpoint of HIV prevention, we want to make sure that those who are infected, those who are leaving prison systems, know how to avoid infecting others."
 

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