The Russian AIDS crisis? This LA Times piece mulls the coming spread of HIV in Russia. Here is an interesting excerpt:

But Vadim Pokrovsky, director of Russia's federal AIDS center, argues that the recent drop-off makes the situation no less alarming. "Last year, about 88,000 new cases were registered. In the first six months of this year, we registered about 26,000 new cases-which may seem to some analysts as a slowdown," he said. "But the number of new cases in which the virus was transmitted heterosexually rose to 7% compared with 4.3% last year, which demonstrates the epidemic is spreading over the majority sector of the population. "And thus it begins to develop according to the African scenario, where the majority of the HIV patients contracted it heterosexually." In Pokrovsky's view, if just half of the HIV-infected population spreads the virus to one sexual partner per year-which he considers conservative based on the African experience-Russia could have as many as 5 million HIV cases by 2010 and will have suffered 500,000 AIDS deaths.

This is an application of the axiom of equality-or more properly in this case, the axiom of similarity (I'm patenting the second one Godless!). It doesn't take into account cultural differences, and surely not the reality of human biodiversity. To use the African template is going to lead one down the wrong path. You could read The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS-which applies mostly to the developed world, and especially the United States. Russia is a different case, but a second world country like Thailand, which also has a flourishing sex industry, is probably a better model. The Thai rate of infection of 2% is not something to be gleeful about, but it is a far cry from the contemporaneous explosions in southern Africa (on the order of 20-30% rates). In the United States the epidemic is still concentrated among certain groups. The idea that everyone is a target tends to prevent proper allocation of resources [1]. Africa's situation is different: AIDS is killing the best and the brightest, and it is tearing the heart of out of societies. On the other hand, AIDS tends to effect the socially marginal in the developed world: homosexuals, drug users, and (some) ethnic minorities. The chasm between the two situations needs to be acknowledged. Southern Africa has outpaced regions like Thailand in recent years despite a later initiation of the epidemic in the region. Why? Well-I'll let you draw your own conclusions.... [1] Opportunity is probably one key reason that gay men are so prone to being infected (in addition to anal sex of course). If straight men could have so many partners, I suspect they would "slip up" a lot more frequently... Godless adds: You will never see an AIDS epidemic in China or Japan or Russia that comes anywhere close to the figures in sub-Saharan Africa. Any news article that tries to sell you this line will usually do so by citing a derivative or a second derivative rather than an absolute value (e.g. "the rate of increase in new AIDS cases is 100% greater than it was last year!"). AIDS is a problem in sub-Saharan Africa because sub-Saharan Africans have more sexual partners than people in other countries. See here for some stats; more upon request.