Skip to main content
  • Poster presentation
  • Open access
  • Published:

Epidemiological aspects of new HIV/AIDS diagnoses in south-east Romania

Introduction

The characteristic of HIV/AIDS Romanian epidemic is the high proportion of youth infected in 1988-1990, during their first year of life, when a nosocomial epidemiological accident took place. In Galati (South-East Romania) they were recorded 535 people with HIV/AIDS during 1990-2003 and 79.5% belonged to the pediatric nosocomial cohort. The mortality was 56.8% and half of the deaths were recorded during the first year after diagnosis. The aim of the study is to identify the changes in the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the last 10 years.

Materials and methods

This retrospective study was based on epidemiological reports of the newly diagnosed HIV/AIDS patients. The descriptive statistics and comparative Kaplan-Meier graphs by transmission way were analyzed using XL-Stat Software.

Results

During 2004-2013, 182 new patients have been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in Galati. Most patients are young people with the same age as the pediatric cohort of HIV/ AIDS, but predominance of heterosexual transmission marks the change of the epidemic pattern. (table 1). Late presentation is less associated with sexual than other transmission ways (p=0.026), but is most likely expected in males (p=0,003), with symptomatic context (p<0,001). Death rate is 15%. Retention in care was achieved in 95% of cases. Tuberculosis is still the leading indicator of AIDS (21.4%). Tuberculosis (12/26) and cancer disease (6/26) are the main causes of death.

Table 1 Characteristics of new HIV/AIDS diagnosed patients in Galati

Conclusions

The life expectancy of HIV/AIDS patients has obviously improved in the last decade, but the yearly number of new cases is constant, with a high rate of late presenters. The strategy of future screening programs should consider the trends of HIV/AIDS epidemic in our region.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Arbune, M., Georgescu, C., Tutunaru, D. et al. Epidemiological aspects of new HIV/AIDS diagnoses in south-east Romania. BMC Infect Dis 14 (Suppl 2), P53 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-14-S2-P53

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-14-S2-P53

Keywords