Young people face an unprecedented risk of catching AIDS, in particular because they missed the first wave of safe sex campaigning about the disease a decade or more ago, the European Commission warned.

　　In a message ahead of World AIDS Day on Wednesday, EU health commissioner Markos Kyprianou also noted that the European Union's new Baltic member states had shown the biggest increase in AIDS infection in recent years.

　　"With HIV infection rates rising across our continent, urgent action is needed to avert a public health disaster," he said Tuesday.

　　"A big factor behind rising infection rates appears to be that many young people are either unaware of, or choose to ignore, advice about safe sex," he said, noting that teenagers and people in their early twenties, "are too young to remember the safe sex campaigns of the 1980s and early 1990s."

　　According to EU data, the number of newly reported HIV cases in the EU has nearly doubled since 1996, with the most drastic increase observed in the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

　　The trio of ex-Soviet republics were among 10 countries which joined the EU in May. The commission noted that in neighbouring Russia almost one million people are infected with HIV, 80 percent of whom are under 30 years old.

　　EU cooperation commissioner Louis Michel warned that girls and women carry a heavier burden and are affected more often and at an earlier age by the HIV virus than men. Nearly 40 million people now live with HIV/AIDS, he noted.

　　The situation is particularly critical in Sub-Saharan Africa, where higher rates of poverty among women, lack of education, and sexual violence inside and outside marriage make women more susceptible to infection, he said.