HIV in Central Asia: Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan

Abstract

The Central Asian Republics of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan vary in size, gross national product, social and political organization, and ethnic composition. Nonetheless, a number of factors argue for their inclusion in a single chapter on Central Asian responses to HIV. The territories of the three countries overlap, with national borders originally demarcated under Stalin interlocking like a jigsaw puzzle. All three of the republics experienced disruption of social supports in general and health care financing in particular following the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as large scale internal and external migration. All sit on drug trafficking routes for opiates produced in Afghanistan and moved through Central Asia toward markets in Russia, Eastern and Western Europe. All reported sharply increasing rates of injection drug use and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in the early 1990s, and rapidly growing HIV epidemics concentrated among injecting drug users (IDUs) from 2000 onward. While HIV prevalence in all three republics remains relatively low, the growth of new cases in all three countries is among the fastest in the world. Finally, international donors such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the United Kingdom's Department for International Development (DFID) and the World Bank have frequently treated the Central Asian republics as a unit for HIV prevention, giving grants meant to support similar activities in multiple countries. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008.