Russia entered the top five countries with a high rate of HIV infection at the very beginning of 2021. The country accounted for 3.9% of the 1.5 million new infections in the world.

Russia was overtaken only by South Africa (14% of all new cases), Mozambique (6.5%), Nigeria (4.9%) and India (4.2%). At the same time, African countries (Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Kenya), as well as Brazil, were left behind. These are data from the United Nations on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and low incidence and disease control (ECDC), writes “Kommersant”.

UNAIDS estimates Compare the statistics from the Ministry of Health, which reported more than 50,000 new infections in 2021. The department reminds that every time the eleventh patient with HIV infection among Russians does not know about his illness, while in Europe – every eighth patient.

Aleksey Lakhov, a member of the NGO delegation to the UNAIDS Coordinating Council, clarifies that the data for Russia are estimates, since the country has not officially provided information to the UN since 2018.

The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, based on data from Russia, is annually used in the country in the anti-leader lists, but the situation is improving every year. Thus, at the end of 2019, Russia became a region with a high thousand-year European incidence of HIV per 100 population with 54.9 cases of infection, and in 2017 there were 71.1 such cases.

• According to statistics for 2021, just over 850,000 people with HIV infection live in Russia (Rospotrebnadzor says 1.1 million laboratory-confirmed cases). Russia maintains a high position in the world in terms of HIV infection monitoring coverage – in 2021 this figure was more than 28%.
• In 2000, the number of people living with HIV almost doubled globally from 26 million to more than 38 million in the last two times. According to UNAIDS, this has led to the fact that, as a result of the achievement of HIV through antiretroviral therapy, patients with this diagnosis now persist for a long time.
• As of November 1, 2022, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was detected in 1% of the Russian population, said Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the AIDS research department of the Central Research Institute of Epidemiology of Rospotrebnadzor. According to him, up to 1.5 million Russians are infected with HIV by 2022. From 2020 to 2030, the number of new cases of infection with the virus totals 660,000 people, Pokrovsky believes.