Unlike the flattening or even declining rates of HIV infection among nearly all other communities, the epidemic among gay men globally is rapidly expanding.

But according to new research, the reason for this fast expansion is biological, not behavioral, thus countering some of the core priorities of traditional AIDS funding.

“The trajectory of HIV epidemics among MSM” – men who have sex with men – “is expanding virtually everywhere we look, in low-, middle- and high-income countries, and across all regions,” Chris Beyrer, a professor of international health, told a panel discussion here on Thursday.

“Much of this comes down to a fundamental biological reality: it’s not about gender but about the gut.”

Beyrer, who contributed to a recent groundbreaking special issue of The Lancet, the British medical journal, on HIV in MSM, says that researchers have found that the HIV virus is far more efficiently transmitted through the gut, hence leading to a far higher transmission probability in anal sex, for either a man or a woman – around 18 times more likely than through vaginal transmission.

Further, because gay men can switch sexual roles in a way that is impossible among heterosexual couples – acting as both the acquisition and transmission partner – the efficiency of transmission among MSM networks appears to be far higher than previously understood.

In a hypothetical MSM group in which men did not alternate their sexual roles, Beyrer reports that HIV incidence could be reduced by up to 55 percent.

“The network-level effects are really trumping the individual level,” he says. “So, people who have modest individual-level risks but who are having sex in ...

Despite pledges from governments across Eastern Europe and Central Asia to fight HIV/AIDS – one of the eight Millennium Development Goals – the region has the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemic.

Punitive drug policies, discrimination and problems with access to medicines and important therapy are all driving an epidemic which is unlikely to be contained, world experts say, until governments in countries with the worst problems change key policies and approaches to the disease.

Daniel Wolfe, director of the International Harm Reduction Development Program at the Open Society Foundations, told IPS: “In most post-Soviet countries, where HIV remains concentrated among injecting drug users, harsh policies and discrimination in healthcare settings continue to cripple the AIDS response.”

Figures showing the extent of the region’s problems with the disease make grim reading. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), while HIV infection rates are actually falling globally, Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) is seeing the reverse.

The WHO says that there were 170,000 new HIV infections in the region in 2011. New infections have risen 22 percent in the EECA since 2005, and there is no sign of a slowdown.

Injection drug use has been identified as fuelling the epidemic – accounting for up to 70 percent of new infections, according to the WHO.

Activists say the key to tackling the epidemic lies first and foremost in combating the injecting drug use problem, but that official and unofficial stances towards drugs and their users are stopping the problem being effectively tackled, or are even making it worse.

Dasha Ocheret of the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network, told IPS: “Punitive drug policies have to be stopped. People are afraid to get treatment for fear of criminal ...

Less than a third of people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States are in successful enough treatment that they will remain healthy and reduce the likelihood of transmitting the virus to their sexual partners, according to the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health officials believe they must dramatically boost that number in order to control the epidemic, which has ravaged black communities in particular and is still growing among black gay and bisexual men.

The CDC released its latest update on the HIV/AIDS epidemic on Tuesday, in advance of World AIDS Day on Dec. 1. This spring marked 30 years since the public health agency first reported on the condition that would later be identified as HIV infection. Roughly half of those living with HIV/AIDS in the U.S. are black, as are roughly half of those who are newly infected each year.

Reducing what’s called a patient’s “viral load” is a core part of HIV treatment. The more virus that’s circulating in your blood, the weaker your immune system becomes and the more likely you are to develop a fatal illness. Treatment specialists believe a viral count under 550 copies of the virus per milliliter of blood is the magic number to stay healthy; go above that mark and you should start taking anti-retroviral drugs, they say.

But CDC officials have also said that a viral load below 200 meaningfully reduces the risk of transmitting the virus to a sexual partner. Tuesday, the CDC reported that only 28 percent of the estimated 1.2 million Americans living with HIV have viral counts that low. That news comes as a dampener to big, promising news earlier this year, when researchers found that successful treatment lowered the likelihood of transmitting HIV by a shocking 96 percent.

Federal health officials also estimate that 20 ...