Eastern Europe & Central Asia

The AIDS epidemic in Eastern Europe & Central Asia is rapidly increasing. In 2008, some 1.5 million people were living with HIV, compared to 900,000 in 2001. AIDS claimed an estimated 87,000 lives during 2008, over three times 2001's figure.

In any country where rates of injecting drug use and needle sharing are high, 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. Heroin smuggled into the West crosses through a number of Eastern European countries, and its path is marked by a high concentration of injecting drug users, and a high HIV prevalence.

The Russian Federation, Ukraine, and the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) are the worst affected, although HIV continues to spread in Belarus, Moldova and Kazakhstan, and more recent epidemics are emerging in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. An estimated 940,000 HIV-infected people were living in the Russian Federation at the end of 2007. However, as reporting of HIV cases in many areas of Russia is at best patchy, it is difficult to determine a precise figure. The epidemic in Eastern Europe is primarily driven by injecting drug use, and the criminalisation of this practice makes it difficult to gain an accurate picture of the proportion of drug users who are living with HIV.