AIDS around world - Eastern Europe & Central Asia

A Doctor councils at an AIDS helpline in Prague, Czech Republic

The AIDS epidemic in Eastern Europe & Central Asia shows no signs of declining. Some 210,000 people were infected with HIV in 2004, bringing the total number of people living with the virus to around 1.4 million, and AIDS claimed 60,000 lives in the past year. Eastern Europe is home to the fastest growing arm of the global HIV epidemic.

In any country with unsafe drug-injecting practises, a fresh outbreak of HIV is liable to occur at any time. This is especially true of the countries in Eastern Europe where the HIV epidemics are still young and have so far spared some cities and sub-populations. In the Russian Federation, a new outbreak of HIV among injecting drug users (IDUs) in the Moscow region in 1999, resulted in the reporting of more than three times as many new cases in that year as in all the previous years combined. The route of heroin smuggled into the West crosses through a number of Eastern European countries, and it's path is marked by a high concentration of IDUs, and a high HIV prevalence.

Worst affected are the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), but HIV continues to spread in Belarus, Moldova and Kazakhstan, while more recent epidemics are now evident in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. It is now estimated that around 860,000 people aged 15-49 are living with HIV in the Russian Federation, although reporting of HIV cases is at best patchy in many areas. The epidemic in Eastern Europe is driven by injecting drug use, and the criminalisation of this practise makes it difficult to gain an accurate picture of the proportion of drug users who are HIV+.