By Sonia Oxley MOSCOW, Nov 26 (Reuters) - Russia's health ministry said on Wednesday unregulated prostitution was compounding an AIDS epidemic in a region the United Nations says has the fastest growing number of cases. Up to 1.8 million people in Eastern Europe and Central Asia are infected by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. U.N. estimates show some 40 million people worldwide are living with HIV/AIDS. The infection is commonly transmitted via shared needles among drug users or through unprotected sex. There is no cure. "Prostitution is becoming more of a social and medical problem in Russia and CIS countries," first deputy health minister Gennady Onishchenko told a news conference ahead of AIDS day on December 1. "The absence of legal regulation in this sphere is worsening the situation in this country." Drug abuse and prostitution often go hand in hand, with the World Bank estimating 60 percent of Russia's sex workers inject drugs. Russia probably has close to two million drug users, Onishchenko said. Three quarters of Russia's 257,120 registered HIV carriers were drug users, he said. Health workers say the real number of those infected could be four or five times higher. "Eastern Europe and Central Asia have the fastest growing epidemic," said Professor Lars Kallings, assistant U.N. Secretary-General. "From a political, economic and military aspect, this is a very serious turn of the HIV/AIDS epidemic." Young people aged 15 to 29 -- a vital part of the workforce -- account for 70-80 percent of HIV carriers in Russia and a high percentage of drug users. Onishchenko said this trend had already led to a shortages of workers. "In the past 10 years...more than 20,000 drug addicts were not called up to the army...and 10,000 HIV-infected young people did not go," he said. "These are real losses society carries." Burgeoning numbers of children contract HIV from infected mothers. Some 7,591 Russian children are infected and the youngest registered drug addict is six years old. "The heartbreaking aspect is that extraordinarily large numbers of very young people are regularly injecting drugs," said Kallings. "The threat to the young generation is very serious indeed." HIV is also rife in Russia's overcrowded prisons, where two percent of around one million inmates are infected. In ex-Soviet Uzbekistan a third of prisoners are carriers. The world's worst affected region is Sub-Saharan Africa where there are around 26.6 million cases of HIV/AIDS.
