The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Ukraine: stable or still exploding?

A recent article published in Sexually Transmitted Infections 1 presented evidence suggesting that the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Ukraine had peaked in 1997 and has since declined. The world has only recently awoken to the threat of a widespread HIV/AIDS epidemic in eastern Europe, including projections of an epidemic in Russia of between 6–11% by 2010, and the potential for economic decline and geopolitical instability.2 HIV trends in Ukraine, with many of the same socioeconomic characteristics and risk factors found in Russia—namely, large numbers of injecting drug users (IDUs), an expanding sex industry, internal and external migration, poor access to health care, …