The AIDS epidemic gripping millions worldwide spread at lightning speed in 2001, with countries of the former Soviet bloc now facing the fastest growing infection rate, a UN report said today.
Around the globe, AIDS has become the fourth biggest killer - with heart disease the first - the report said, adding that 40 million people now carry the virus.
An estimated one million people in the former Soviet Union and ex-communist Eastern Europe now carry HIV, the virus which causes AIDS, the annual report said.
The number of HIV infections is rising faster in this region than anywhere else in the world, said Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, the UN AIDS umbrella group.
"And the epidemic is only in its early stages -- it will get worse before it gets better," he told a press conference.
About one-third of those living with AIDS are aged 15-24, the annual UNAIDS report said. Most of them do not know they carry the virus. Many millions more know nothing or too little about HIV to protect themselves against it.
Despite the rising infection rates elsewhere, Africa continues to be the critical blackspot for the virus, with Africans accounting for almost three-quarters of all those infected with HIV or AIDS.
The HIV virus, which is carried in the blood and other body fluids, is passed on through sexual contact, drug-use involving sharing of needles and transfusions of contaminated blood.