The expansion of the HIV epidemic in this region has been alarmingly rapid, with HIV prevalence doubling over a 10- year period since 2000. This is the only region in the world where the HIV epidemic continues to be clearly 16 on the rise. The total number of people living with HIV has tripled between 2000 and 2010, with up to seven-fold increases in certain countries and regions in the past couple of years alone. The region includes five of the seven countries with the highest HIV incidence rates in the world: Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Around 90 per cent of those living with HIV in the region are in Ukraine and the Russian Federation. The epidemic is driven by an explosive mix of unprotected sex and injecting drug use in a region that has an estimated 3.7 million injecting drug users – one quarter of the world’s total.17 But sexual transmission is on the rise, affecting socially excluded and stigmatized populations and, increasingly, women.
HIV and AIDS Women now account for around 40 per cent of new cases, up from 24 per cent less than a decade ago.18 The number of HIV-positive pregnancies has doubled since 2005. Almost 100,000 HIV-positive mothers have given birth since the beginning of the HIV epidemic, most within the past five years.19 An estimated 18,000 children in the region were living with HIV in 2009, up from 4,000 in 2001.20