Countries with the Most HIV

It's absolute numbers, so countries with large populations are more likely to end up on the list.

Ukraine has the highest HIV prevalence rate in Europe. Almost all of it from a big spike in IV drug use there following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Still, it's only at 3% which is much lower than most Sub-Saharan African countries, but as sillie points out, there are a lot of people living in Ukraine. Indonesia has a huge population but the HIV rate there is miniscule, even though it's also increasing there faster than almost anywhere.

All of this shows up in my own quiz I did on the subject.

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a lentivirus (a subgroup of retrovirus) that causes HIV infection and over time acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). AIDS is a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive. Without treatment, average survival time after infection with HIV is estimated to be 9 to 11 years, depending on the HIV subtype. In most cases, HIV is a sexually transmitted infection and occurs by contact with or transfer of blood, pre-ejaculate, semen, and vaginal fluids. Non-sexual transmission can occur from an infected mother to her infant through breast milk. An HIV-positive mother can transmit HIV to her baby both during pregnancy and childbirth due to exposure to her blood or vaginal fluid. Within these bodily fluids, HIV is present as both free virus particles and virus within infected immune cells.

I made a quiz which includes this data, linked above.

this isnt the place to ask, go to a damn doctor

Pretty sure this was a joke but can be hard to tell with some people.

For the USA it's probably due to irresonsible promiscuous homosexuality. It looks like about 2/3-3/4 of HIV cases are homosexual males. And >80% of female cases are from contact with infected males.

Remember around the monkeypox spread, when a quarter of the men reported >15 sexual partners in the previous 3 months. And the average was something like >5 partners in 3 months.

From hiv.gov, "In 2019, the largest percentages of HIV infections were attributed to male-to-male sexual contact (66% overall and 81% among males.) In 2019, among females, the largest percentage of HIV infection was attributed to heterosexual contact (83%)"

And for whatever reason, blacks/hispanics in the US accounted for @70% of the new diagnoses.

if Africa is the exception, it would likely just be based on population.