IRELAND ranks 15th among 20 European countries in reported AIDS cases. But the true prevalence may be higher, says Cairde, an organisation which helps people with HIV and AIDS.
"Many people travel to Britain for HIV testing, attracted by the anonymity of British services," says Cairde in a report outlining its five year development plan. "Positive tests, in these incidences, would show up in the British statistics, not the Irish ones."
The European country with the highest reported level of AIDS cases is Spain, followed by Switzerland and France. The UK is number 10.
The reported prevalence in Ireland is 109 per million population, compared with 619 in Spain and 156 in the UK.
"A worrying trend is the increasing number of both AIDS cases and AIDS deaths," says the report. "In the six months from March to September 1995, 28 more cases were reported and 28 people died of AIDS. This is a high total for one single six month period."
The report suggests that the relatively low rate of homosexual transmission of AIDS in this country may have two explanations: the legal ban on sex between men, which was repealed in 1993, and action taken by the gay community in Ireland in the 1980s.
In Britain, 64 per cent of AIDS cases are regarded as resulting from sexual intercourse between men, whereas the proportion in Ireland is 18 per cent. Here, injecting drug use is the main cause, accounting for 52 per cent of cases, compared with 10 per cent in Britain.
In both countries heterosexual intercourse accounts for 13 per cent of cases.