HIV and Injection Drug Use in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia

"By far the highest prevalence of HIV among PWID [People Who Inject Drugs] is in South-West Asia and in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, with rates that are, respectively, 2.4 and 1.9 times the global average. Together, those two subregions account for 49 per cent of the total number of PWID worldwide living with HIV. Although the prevalence of HIV among PWID in East and South-East Asia is below the global average, 24 per cent of the global total of PWID living with HIV reside in that subregion. An estimated 53 per cent of PWID living with HIV worldwide in 2016 (662,000 people) resided in just three countries (China, Pakistan and the Russian Federation), which is disproportionately large compared with the percentage of the world’s PWID living in those three countries (35 per cent)."