Health experts meet in Europe in fight against HIV

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More than 300 European health experts are meeting in Brussels for a conference on AIDS and HIV across the continent.

Recent surveys suggest that more than half the people in Europe who are HIV-positive do not know they are infected.

Western Europe has advantages in the fight against HIV. Many countries have affordable health care, needle and syringe exchange programs for drug users, and they also screen donated blood.

But there are still problems, with experts saying some populations are both high risk and hard to reach, such as migrant workers.

In eastern Europe the picture is far more bleak, as the number of known cases of HIV has increased by about 150 per cent since 2001.

Almost all the new cases are in Russia and Ukraine, and two-thirds of them involve injecting drug use.