TIRANA, Dec. 1 – More than 100 people, including a child, have been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS this year in Albania, officials confirmed on Dec. 1, the World AIDS Day.
“There were 102 people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in the first eleven months of this year. More than 60 percent of the identified people are in advanced stages of the disease. This means these people were not infected this year, they have been infected for years, but appeared to receive assistence only this year,” says Roland Bani, the national coordinator for HIV/AIDS programme at the Public Health Institute.
“Sexual transmission continues dominating with 93 percent of the cases, 10 percent of which through same-sex relations,” he added.
Since the early 1990s when the first case was officially reported, HIV/AIDS has affected more than 1,000 people in Albania, claiming 161 lives.
A Public Health Institute report shows the number of HIV cases in the past decade has increased 5-fold compared to 1993, when the first HIV case was reported in the country. The number of infected people from the early 1990s until 2004 ranged from 2 to 26 annually.
However, Albania remains a country with a low HIV prevalence rate despite a rising number of reported infected people in the past few years.
The increase in HIV positive cases in the past few years has also raised the challenge of their integration at public schools. HIV has infected a total of 40 children since the early 1990s.
Local media have often reported cases of bias among children and parents against HIV infected children despite posing no risk to infection.
People living in urban areas are most exposed to HIV infection with almost three-quarters of total cases. Almost half of the infected cases, some 48 percent, are reported in Tirana, which accounts for almost a third of the country’s 2.8 million resident population.
Currently, people living with HIV/AIDS are offered treatment only at the Mother Teresa university hospital centre in Tirana which also provides free antiretroviral drugs.
The World Health Organization reports there were approximately 36.7 million people living with HIV at the end of 2015.
