Russia's Aids catastrophe growing
Injecting drugs
Infection rates rocket among East European drug users
The spiralling rate of HIV infection in Russia and eastern Europe has been revealed by shocking new figures.
The annual "Aids Epidemic Update" from the United Nations and World Health Organisation estimates that more than 36m people around the world are now living with HIV or Aids.
Although sub-Saharan Africa is still the main focus of the HIV epidemic worldwide, new infections there have fallen slightly.
UNAIDS figures for 2000
5.3 million people newly infected with HIV
34.7 million adults living with HIV/AIDS
1.4 million children living with HIV/AIDS
3 million deaths from AIDS
2.4 million deaths from AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa
21.8 million deaths from AIDS so far
47% of HIV adults are women
This, say scientists, may be because, in some countries and age groups, the infected outnumber the uninfected.
But one of the new regions of greatest concern is eastern Europe, and Russia in particular, where experts predict more than a million people will be infected by HIV within two years.
In fact more new HIV infections have been registered in Russia during 2000 than all previous years put together.
The UNAids report confirms that "HIV shows no sign of curbing its exponential growth in the Russian Federation".
Prostitutes in down-town Moscow
Aids has also spread among Russia's prostitutes
There are now almost 70,000 cases of full blown Aids registered with the National Aids Centre in Russia - compared to just over 5,500 last year.
The majority of those with HIV in Eastern Europe are injecting drug users, although there has also been an increasing spread among sex workers.
There are an estimated three to four million drug users in Russia, say Medicins Sans Frontiers, and pessimists believe as many as two million drug users could be infected by 2002.
In Western Europe and the United States the UNAidsreport describes efforts to slow the spread of HIV as having "stalled".
Estimates suggest that the number of people newly infected during 2000 has not fallen from the previous year, when 30,000 acquired HIV in Western Europe and 45,000 in North America.
It says: "In this era in which few young gay men have seen friends die of Aids, and some mistakenly view anti-retrovirals as a cure, there is growing complacency about the HIV risk..."
It is injecting drug users, however, who are believed to form the bulk of those newly infected in most higher income countries.
Africa bears the brunt
The latest figures show, say researchers, that Aids has "brought a global epidemic far more extensive than predicted a decade ago"