Europe will miss its targets to combat HIV, tuberculosis (TB), hepatitis, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) without significant investments in public health, regional health authorities have warned.

These four diseases cause nearly 57,000 deaths every year in the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway, according to the new report from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

But many countries are not on track to meet official goals to eliminate infectious disease epidemics by 2030, and the region has not met most of these targets for 2025.

“These diseases are preventable, as is the burden they place on health systems, patients, and their families,” ECDC Director Pamela Rendi-Wagner said in a statement.

Some progress has been made. The number of new HIV infections has fallen by 35 per cent since 2010, and TB incidence has decreased by 35 per cent since 2015 – though the region’s goals were a respective 75 per cent and 50 per cent reduction by 2025.

STIs reaching record levels

The number of deaths from AIDS-related causes has fallen by 30 per cent since 2010, with 3,300 deaths in 2023. But health officials had wanted to cut that figure in half.

Deaths from hepatitis B and C remain high, and cases of acute hepatitis B are rising. The infections spread through sexual contact or when drug users share contaminated syringes, and can cause cirrhosis and liver cancer.

Meanwhile, rates of STIs such as syphilis and gonorrhoea are reaching record levels.

Authorities now detect almost all new and relapsed TB cases, but drug resistance and treatment remain challenging. In 2022, just 68 per cent of people who started TB treatment actually completed it, falling short of the region’s 90 per cent target.

The ECDC called for additional efforts to prevent these diseases, for example improving uptake of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to help prevent HIV infection, increasing vaccinations for hepatitis B, and getting people to use condoms.

The agency also wants countries to expand testing services to try to detect infections earlier on, shore up data collection, and take steps to help people with diseases like TB – for which they must take daily pills for four to nine months – stay on their treatment.

“We have five years to act; we must make them count,” Rendi-Wagner said.