ATHENS, Greece, May 19 (UPI) -- Those travelling abroad should take seriously advice to pack their condoms and keep any needles to themselves, a virologist in Greece advises.
Dr. Dimitrios Paraskevis, a virologist at the National Retrovirus Reference Center at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, says tourists, travelers and migrants from Greece, Portugal, Serbia and Spain actively export HIV-1 subtype B to other European nations.
An international team of scientists used samples from 17 European countries to construct a viral phylogeography -- a geographic pattern of genetic information taken from viruses at a number of locations that track how and when it spread.
No significant exporting migration of HIV-1 subtype B was observed in Austria, Poland and Luxembourg. However, Greece, Portugal, Serbia and Spain were a source of subtype B to other countries.
The study, published in the journal Retrovirology, found the virus spread widely from Greece and Spain to seven and five target countries respectively. Other countries had narrower targets, with Italy exporting HIV to Austria, and Portugal passing the virus primarily to Luxembourg -- some 13 percent of Luxembourg's population is Portuguese.
Other nations such as Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and Luxembourg showed only limited export of HIV-1 subtype B, while for Italy, Israel, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and Britain the authors inferred significant bidirectional migration. No significant migration was found in Poland.
