More than half the new cases of HIV diagnosed in Ireland are to people born in sub-Saharan Africa, an AIDS conference has been told.
The increase in HIV prevalence among non-nationals has placed those working with the disease in a difficult position, Ms Ann Nolan, director of the Dublin AIDS Alliance, told the conference.
"Although we make representations on their behalf, we're afraid to highlight their cases in the media for fear of increasing discrimination against HIV non-nationals, who have, to our shame, already suffered enough."
Ms Nolan said failed asylum-seekers who were HIV-positive were facing deportation to countries where no treatment was available. Deportations involved health risks, including the possibility that drug-resistant strains of the disease would be promoted. The High Court would shortly be hearing a case taken by a pregnant HIV-positive woman whose asylum application had failed, she said.
Although HIV rates in Ireland were relatively low by European standards, they had started to rise again, she said. Homosexuals and intravenous drug-users were perceived as the groups most at risk, but heterosexual drug use was the primary mode of transmission.
Some 3,216 people have been diagnosed with HIV in Ireland, and 731 with full-blown AIDS. There were 369 AIDS-related deaths to the end of 2002.
Ms Nolan said clinics and AIDS groups were suffering a "crisis of capacity" in dealing with cases. The prevalence among drug-users was increasing again because of different injection practices and the growing use of cocaine intravenously.
In the gay community there had been an increase in cases among young men who grew up after the wave of publicity about the disease in the 1980s and 1990s.
Mr Mark Heywood, treasurer of the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, said the AIDS epidemic was being eclipsed by the war on terrorism, yet AIDS was a much greater short- and long-term threat to global security.
"It is undermining the fabric of my country, and many others, by creating a lopsided society dominated by children and old people, while the productive generations die," he said.
"That mightn't seem as direct a threat as Osama bin Laden, but it has huge knock-on effects throughout the world."
Of the 30 million HIV sufferers in Africa, fewer than 50,000 were receiving treatment with anti-retroviral drugs that are commonly available in the west.
Mr Heywood, a former ANC activist, criticised the South African government which, he said, was refusing to acknowledge the scale of the problem in his country.
Another South African speaker, Ms Veronica Khosa, highlighted the scale of the problem in her home province, Gauteng. There, the graveyards used only operate at weekends; however, because of the number of deaths, they now buried people every day, and the council had asked families to cremate their dead because of a lack of space.
Dr Steve Collins, of Valid International, said there was great potential in applying techniques for treating malnourishment to the treatment of HIV/AIDS. In Europe, before anti-retroviral drugs became available, the average span between someone becoming infected with HIV and death was 15 years, whereas in Africa it was just five years.
