The number of new HIV cases in Russia in 2000 (56,630) was almost a double of the total registered starting from 1987, the year when the first HIV-infected person had been detected in this country.
In 2002 and 2003, however, the number of official registered cases declined, probably thanks to the fact that almost all of intravenous drug addicts had been tested for HIV, UN experts say.
The use of intravenous drugs assumed enormous proportions in Russia in the first post-Soviet decade. It was the spread of drug abuse that triggered an AIDS epidemic here, say UN experts.
Young people make the population group worst affected by the virus in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the UN report indicates. People aged under 30 form the bulk of HIV carriers here. In North America and Western Europe, by contrast, a mere 30 percent of HIV infected people are younger than 30.
According to UNAIDS estimates, the number of HIV carriers in Russia is somewhere between 420,000 and 1,400,000. The picture is patchy: more than fifty percent of registered cases fall on the share of ten Federation member states out of the 89, including Moscow and the surrounding region, St. Petersburg and the region, the Irkutsk region (in Siberia), Samara and Saratov (on the Volga River), Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk (in the Ural Mountains).
Most of the Russians who take drugs intravenously are men. But the proportion of women in the total number of Russia's HIV carriers keeps growing. It was 1 to 4 in 2001, but became 1 to 3 just a year later, the UNAIDS report says. This tendency is especially conspicuous in regions ravaged by the epidemic the longest. Which gives grounds to assume that sexual contacts are becoming an increasingly common way of HIV transmission in this country, the report concludes.
