HIV/AIDS is spreading fastest in eastern Europe and Asia

Eastern Europe and Asia have the fastest growing HIV/AIDS epidemics in the world, the latest report from UNAIDS says.

The report, released to coincide with the 15th international AIDS conference, which opens in Bangkok this weekend, also estimates that five million people became newly infected with HIV in 2003—the greatest number in any one year since the beginning of the epidemic.

Speaking at a press conference in London, Dr Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, the joint UN programme for HIV/AIDS, said: “HIV/AIDS used to be mainly a problem for sub-Saharan Africa—which is still the most affected continent—but today one out of every four new infections occurs in Asia.

“And in the former Soviet Union, there are about 60% more people living with HIV than two years ago.” Epidemics in eastern Europe and central Asia are fuelled by injecting drug use, and 80% of the new infections occur in people aged under 30 years.

Thailand and Cambodia are praised in the report for having tackled high risk behaviour in groups such as sex workers and having reduced the number of new HIV infections. In Thailand, for example, the annual number of new infections has fallen from about 140 000 in 1991 to 21 000 in 2003.

Dr Piot also said that there seemed to be a slowing down of new HIV infections in eastern Africa, in the major urban areas—from Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, to Lilongwe in Malawi. “This slowing down of new infections is particularly [occurring] in young people.”

Women in sub-Saharan Africa are more vulnerable to HIV infection than young men, with young women up to five times more likely to become infected than their male counterparts. Dr Piot said: “In southern Africa, teenage girls are infected more frequently than boys because of intergenerational sex... First sexual intercourse [for teenage girls] is with men 5 to 15 years older than them, and they [the men] are more likely to [already] be infected with HIV and this sex is often non-consensual.”

Although funding had increased more than 15-fold, from $300m (£164m; €244m) in 1996 to $5bn in 2003, this was still only half of what was needed, said Dr Piot.

Only 7% of the people who need antiretroviral drugs in developing countries have access to them.

Figure 1.