In an interview with the Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung, Dr Osamah Hamouda, Head of the HIV/AIDS unit at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin (the German equivalent of the UK’s Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre at the Public Health Laboratory Service) has warned that increases in unsafe sex have been accompanied by rises in sexually transmitted infections and that this may herald an increase in new HIV infections in Germany.
Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic at the beginning of the 1980s until the end of 2001, an estimated 60,000 people in Germany have been diagnosed with HIV, an estimated 25,000 have developed AIDS, and 20,000 have died of AIDS related illnesses.
Every year in Germany around 2,000 new HIV infections are diagnosed and around 700 deaths from AIDS are reported. In total, between 38,000 and 40,000 people with HIV are estimated to be living in Germany.
During 2001, 50% of all new HIV cases were diagnosed in gay men. As in the UK, people who acquired their HIV infection in a country with a high background HIV prevalence rate in the general population are accounting for an ever-increasing proportion of new HIV diagnoses in Germany; accounting for 21% of all new HIV diagnoses in 2001.
In the first six months of 2002, 600 new cases of HIV had been diagnosed and reported to the Robert Koch Institute. Gay men constituted 40% of the total, people from countries with high HIV prevalence 21%, and those who acquired their infection heterosexually, but not from countries with high background HIV prevalence rates, constituted 12% of the total. In total 7% of new HIV diagnoses were made in people who had acquired their infection through IV drug use. Mother-to-child transmission accounts for only a handful of cases each year, less than 1% of the total of all new HIV diagnoses.
New AIDS diagnoses, which declined year on year from a high of 2,052 in 1994, have already begun to rise again in Germany, with more new AIDS cases reported in 2001 than in 2000 and 1999.
New cases of syphilis in Germany in the first half of 2002 reached 1116, surpassing the 756 identified in the first half of 2001.
In the newspaper interview, Dr Hamouda cautioned against making cuts to AIDS prevention programmes, saying that Germany should not allow prevention efforts to be sidelined and develop significant holes. AIDS, he underlined, may be a treatable condition, but cannot be cured.
The original interview can be read here, in German. Or for the latest epidemiological data on HIV in Germany (also in German), click here.