Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

The estimated number of adults and children living with HIV in Eastern Europe and Central Asia has grown by 66% to 1.5 million since 2001, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS said in its 2009 AIDS epidemic update.

"With an adult HIV prevalence of 1.6%, Ukraine has the highest prevalence in all of Europe," UNAIDS and WHO experts said.

Estonia and Russia have "HIV prevalence that exceeds 1%," they said.

"New HIV infections have been reduced by 17% over the past eight years," the experts said.

However, in some countries in Eastern Europe "there are signs that new HIV infections are rising again," they said.

Up to 60 million people have been infected by HIV since the start of the outbreak around the world. A total of 25 million people have been killed by causes related to the virus. There were 33.4 million HIV-infected people in the world in 2008. Two million HIV patients died last year.

"An estimated 430,000 new HIV infections occurred among children under the age of 15 in 2008," the experts said.