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AIDS in E.Europe/C.Asia

Last reviewed: 12-03-2008
Ukrainian girls hold candles during an AIDS awareness rally in Kiev, 2005.
Ukrainian girls hold candles during an AIDS awareness rally in Kiev, 2005.
The AIDS epidemic is growing fast in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The number of people with HIV/AIDS has increased 20-fold in less than a decade, and now stands at 1.6 million.

  • 90 percent of infections are in Russian Federation and Ukraine
  • 150,000 new infections in 2007
  • Epidemic fuelled by injecting drug use and sex work

    The vast majority of the region's HIV/AIDS cases are in the Russian Federation and Ukraine. Two-thirds in the region are injecting drug users, but there are a growing number of infections caused by unprotected sex, especially in Eastern Europe.

    Treatment is poor. In mid-2006 just 13 percent of those who needed it were receiving anti-retroviral drugs. Injecting drug users are particularly weakly covered.

    The official number of people with HIV in the Russian Federation is 370,000, but the Joint U.N. Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) says the actual figure was much higher at about 940,000 at the end of 2005.

    In Russia, high youth unemployment, a boom in drug trafficking and the growth of informal economies have all fuelled rampant injecting drug use. But the virus now appears increasingly to be spreading by injecting drug users having unprotected sex with their partners. In 2005, 40 percent of new infections were in women - most of them partners of drug users.

    There has been a similar trend in Ukraine, where more than half of all new HIV infections were due to unprotected sex with injecting drug users. Sex work is also a key factor, with as many as 32 percent of sex workers in the city of Mykolayiv being HIV-positive. The epidemic is still concentrated in high-risk groups - drug users and their partners, sex workers and men who have sex with men. Less than 1 percent of pregnant women in urban areas have HIV.

    The biggest epidemic in Central Asia is in Uzbekistan, which straddles major drug-trafficking routes. About 31,000 people were living with HIV in 2005, the majority injecting drug users. Since many of them rarely use a condom there is a strong likelihood the virus will spread to their partners.

    UNAIDS has warned that an increase in risky behaviour - drug use and unprotected sex - in the countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia could spark new epidemics across the region.

    Turkmenistan could be among those most at risk due to a lack of sexual health education and poor medical facilities. However, the republic's isolation makes it almost impossible to obtain data on the number of infections there.

    KEY FACTS


    Number infected 1.6 million (UNAIDS 2007)
    Number of new infections in 2007 150,000 (UNAIDS 2007)

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