sometimes good things happen and the world seems to be a rational place. when sauseschritt searched a pack of peanuts in his fridge to watch the news in his hotel in astana, he found: condoms ..... they are part of the standard room equipment.

a world bank report analyses:

(...) The Eastern Europe and Central Asia Region (ECA) is experiencing one of the world’s fastest-growing HIV/AIDS epidemics. According to UNAIDS, in 2005, 270,000 people in ECA became newly infected with HIV. This brings the number of people living with HIV/AIDS to approximately 1.6 million, a number that has increased 20-fold in less than 10 years. An estimated 62,000 people lost their lives to HIV/AIDS this year alone.

The majority of people living with HIV are in the Russian Federation and Ukraine, where the combination of injecting drug use and sex work is fuelling the epidemic.

The patterns of the epidemic are changing in several countries, with sexually transmitted HIV cases making up a growing share of new diagnoses, for example in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Moldova. Across the region, young people are disproportionately affected, with an estimated 75 percent of reported infections between 2000 and 2004 in those under the age of 30 (...)