Time to butter the parsnips
As the EU stands poised to embrace another 10 Member States into the fold next month, it may be opening its borders to more than it bargained for. Some Eastern European countries are home to the fastest-growing AIDS epidemic in the world and these will be among the EU's new neighbours and members.
When so much care has been taken to manage every other aspect of enlargement process - from the use of official languages for the plethora of directives and regulations, down to the smallest detail of dairy subsidies under the cumbersome Common Agriculture Policy - the lack of a coherent strategy for prevention and treatment of AIDS across Europe seems a monumental oversight.
There is no time to waste, Dr Peter Piot, UNAIDS executive director, warned recently. And he pointed out that as the EU will form the biggest trading bloc in the world, covering more than 500 million people, it is in the EU's best interest to prevent the AIDS epidemic from crippling Europe's social and economic development.
Nor is HIV/AIDS the only problem. According to the WHO, tuberculosis patients in parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia are 10 times more likely to have multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) than in the rest of the world.
Global hotspots include three of the accession countries - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - as well as Kazakhstan, parts of the Russian Federation and Uzbekistan, with drug resistance in new patients as high as 14%.
The WHO says increased funding for TB treatment programmes in badly affected areas is the only effective way to tackle the problem, as attempts to contain it through border controls are unlikely to have much effect in an age of mass population movement.
But even in Western Europe where AIDS drugs are freely accessible, infection rates are still rising, and the only explanation for this is that attention has focused on treatment rather than on prevention. As Carol Bellamy, executive director of UNICEF, said, with knowledge so critical in the fight against HIV/AIDS, the best defence against the epidemic is education.
The 10 accession countries will need financial and technical help to stop the spread of AIDS and TB, and verbal commitments on the part of the existing Member States must now be translated into action.
Fine words butter no parsnips. Now is the time to stop paying lip-service to AIDS and TB prevention and start coughing up the Euros. Passport controls will not halt the spread of AIDS and MDR-TB, but investment in prevention through education might stand a chance.