A government panel has declared the spread of the HIV virus that causes AIDS an epidemic in Estonia, health officials said Thursday.
The panel said the spread of the HIV virus in Estonia can be classified as a concentrated epidemic according to the World Health Organization's (WHO) definition.
The concentrated epidemic means a disease is spread within a specific risk group, affecting more than five percent of it, the social affairs ministry said in a statement.
The virus has spread rapidly among intravenous drug users, particularly in the northeastern city of Narva which is populated mostly by Estonia's ethnic-Russian minority.
So far this year 152 people have tested HIV positive in Estonia, taking the overall number of those infected with the virus to 594. Six of them have developed AIDS.
Estonia witnessed the explosive spread of the HIV virus last year when there was a 43-time increase in the number new cases year-on-year – TALLINN (AFP)
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