In a report issued on December 1 to mark World AIDS Day, the Public Health Institute said that 122 people had died of AIDS in Croatia since 1985 when the first HIV-positive patient was registered.
Fifteen AIDS-infected people are registered on average every year. With four infected persons per million inhabitants, Croatia still has a low incidence of the disease.
Epidemiologists say that a broad campaign and health education measures undertaken in the mid-1980s prevented the disease from spreading despite the country's developed tourism industry and people travelling abroad freely.
The epidemiological situation in Croatia still depends on the situation outside the country, because 60 per cent of the patients contracted AIDS abroad, the report said, adding that as much as 92 per cent of heterosexual male patients were infected abroad.
The report said that nine infected children had been registered to date, three of whom had developed full-blown AIDS.
For the first time this year two persons were infected after receiving blood transfusion from an infected donor in whose case it was too early to detect the infection at the time of donation.
Since 1992 not a single case of infection has been registered among haemophiliac patients, and the percentage of infected drug addicts has not shown a trend of growth in the last 10 years. Drug addicts account for 10 per cent of all HIV-positive persons.
In 2003, 194,292 persons were tested for AIDS, of whom 81 tested HIV positive, or 0.04 per cent. Four HIV-positive persons were registered among blood donors, or 0.002 per cent.