“Thousands march in India against EU trade deal,” headlines the EUobserver. With the EU on the verge of concluding a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with India, its largest trading partner, HIV-positive protesters took to the streets of New Delhi on 2 March concerned that the union is seeking to put an end to the production of affordable life-prolonging drugs. Since negotiations opened in 2007, the EU has pushed for a “data-exclusivity” clause which would protect intellectual property rights with respect to drugs. “European drug manufacturers complain that many of their patented products are frequently undercut by generics produced in India,” the Brussels website notes. Data exclusivity would mean that “clinical trial data filed by one company could not be relied upon by other companies,” critics argues. “As a result, the need for each firm to produce its own clinical trial tests would dramatically increase the price of medicines.” According to Anand Grover, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, "It would be a colossal mistake to introduce data exclusivity in India, when millions of people across the globe depend on the country as the pharmacy of the developing world.”

Two representatives of the "AIDS generation" have demanded that the Romanian state officially recognise its responsibility for the infection of several thousand children contaminated with the HIV virus between 1988 and 1992. Adevărul tells the story of the two young people, now aged 21 and 22, whose lives were devastated by "the mixture of medical incompetence, indifference and a lack of appropriate resources" which characterised the Romanian health-care system after the fall of communism. The daily explains that "the Romanian phenomenon," as it was dubbed in the foreign press at the time, notably affected newborns who were vaccinated "en masse" with the same syringe, and childcare centres that administered micro-transfusions to counter the effects of malnutrition.

The Independent in London has no news on its front page at all today, just a nice picture of some gently wilting roses by the artist Gary Hume. Given that its rival The Guardian is publishing the lion’s share of the WilkiLeaks revelations, you could be forgiven for thinking that the paper has given up the ghost completely. But you’d be wrong. Instead it has drafted in the pop legend Elton John as guest editor for World Aids Day and allowed him to fill its pages with some of his pet hates (the EU fighting to protect the interests of pharmaceutical companies) and his heroes (Bill Clinton, the actor Stephen Fry, Cherie Booth, the wife of former British prime minister Tony Blair), who believe people in India and Africa have a right to anti-retroviral drugs at the lowest possible price. Meanwhile, a report published in Portugal indicates that from between 1983 and December 2009 almost 5,000 cases of HIV/AIDS in people over 50 years old were identified, 900 of them being over 65. The new data released by the UN/AIDS says that 42,000 people in the country are infected with the virus, writes Público.

100,000 new cases of HIV infection annually in Europe. Two million seropositive Europeans, 730,000 of them in the EU alone. These figures for the period from 2001–2007, published by European health commissioner Androulla Vassiliou, “prove that the AIDS epidemic, far from receding, is actually steadily spreading, even in industrialised countries,” observes La Stampa.

Hence the European Commission’s decision to relaunch its information and prevention campaign. Its efforts will chiefly target Eastern Europe, where the problem is more acute: nearly one million Russians, 1.1% of the population, are infected. The object is to encourage HIV testing. In the European Union, 30% of the seropositives don’t even know they’ve contracted the virus and inadvertently continue to infect others. This figure is as high as 70% in some Eastern European countries, such as the Ukraine, Moldova and Russia.

România Libera hails a European first, and a milestone in the fight against AIDS – a field in which Romania has made significant efforts over the last decade. On the occasion of the June 25 inauguration of the first European training academy for HIV/AIDS in Bucharest, the daily spoke to health minister Ion Bazac who was keen to point out that much has changed "since the 1990s, when pictures of HIV-positive Romanian children were front page news worldwide." For Bazac, the new Academy will enable the country will have the means to share the experience it acquired "in a ten year-long battle with this public health problem."

"Romania has the largest population of long-term AIDS survivors in all of Eastern Europe," reports România Libera. The daily further notes that the Academy, which will be attached to the Institute for Infectious Diseases and provided with a budget of 1.5 million US dollars, will have a three-fold mission: to offer course programs for medical interns, provide support for a network of experts from over 15 European countries, and coordinate a regional HIV/AIDS plan for Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine and the Caucasus countries.