Love as a Test - Episode 1

Kyrgyzstan and its HIV epidemic

Kyrgyzstan is on a major trading route for opium and its derivatives, including heroin. Most of these drugs are produced in Afghanistan and are bound for Eastern and Western Europe but some are sold en route at comparatively low prices. Injecting drug use was rarely observed or reported in Kyrgyzstan before 1996, when the country’s first case of HIV infection was registered. Six years later, a survey found that 3 percent of all the country’s prisoners were HIV positive, more than 50 percent of all the prisoners were injecting drug users and, of those, 70 percent shared injecting equipment. Now there are an estimated 50,000 to 81,000 IDUs in Kyrgyzstan and they account for three-quarters of all cases of HIV.

From 2001 to 2007, the estimated number of people living with HIV increased from 1,000 to 4,200. HIV prevalence is now 0.1 percent in the general population, but 0.2 percent among young men (15 to 24). UNICEF found 2006 that only 30 percent of young men and 33 percent of young women knew enough about HIV to correctly identify the main ways of preventing sexual transmission and the most common misconceptions about HIV.
One implication is that, while women at present account for only one-quarter of all HIV cases, they may account for increasing proportions as infected males infect their wives and girlfriends.

Kyrgyzstan has an ethnically diverse but predominantly Kyrgyz, Uzbek and Russian population of 5.3 million people with median age of 23.9 years and average life expectancy of 65.9 years. Three-quarters live on the equivalent of less than US$ 4 per day, two-thirds live in rural areas and more than half of all jobs are in agriculture. Although Kyrgyzstan ranks low on the UN’s Gender Equality Index (102nd out of 157 countries), 80 percent of its school-age girls attend primary, secondary or tertiary school compared to 76 percent of its school-age boys, and its adult literacy rate is more than 98 percent among both men and women.