Until recently, young people in Kazakhstan have been only moderately affected by the global HIV epidemic. Today, however, the HIV epidemic in Central Asia is one of the most rapidly increasing epidemics in the world. It is mainly concentrated to vulnerable groups such as intravenous drug users, sex workers, the purchasers of sexual services and the financially marginalized. Young, sexually active people may however be the gateway for the epidemic to the general population, and knowledge about their attitudes and behavior is therefore important in planning preventive measures.
The Republic of Kazakhstan is a large country with a relatively small population of 15 million people. It was formerly part of the Soviet Union and is now a multiethnic society with some different ethnic groups, dominated by Russians and Kazakhs. The relatively stable political situation, the absence of armed conflicts and the vast amounts of natural resources all give hope for future economic progress [ 1 ].
Semey, or Semipalatinsk as it is called in Russian, is a city in northeastern Kazakhstan with approximately , inhabitants, one of the larger industrial cities in the country and long the centre for the Soviet nuclear weapon testing. Central Asia and Eastern Europe still have low numbers of reported HIV cases, but since the year the growth rate of the epidemic has been the fastest in the world [ 2 , 3 ].
Factors creating a risk environment include injecting drug use IDU , migration, economic decline, increasing unemployment and decline in the public health infrastructure [ 5 ]. However, sexual transmission is likely to increase in the near future, spreading the infection to a much larger population [ 7 ]. The HIV situation in Kazakhstan is mostly concentrated to highly vulnerable populations such as injecting drug users and sex workers, but the disease is also spreading to other vulnerable groups including youth, migrants, and truck drivers.
Newly registered HIV cases increased from in to 1, in [ 8 ]. This indicates a shift in the state of the epidemic, spreading from high-risk groups into the general population, as is also happening in neighboring China [ 9 ].
