Ah, guess I just don't get out in the !world@quokk.au enough.

So I want to push back on that.

In the CDC's 2026 report (leaning on 2024 data) there looks be to be a definite upswing of cases in the US, but there was ~38.8k new cases reported with 65% linked to "persons with HIV attributed to male-to-male sexual contact". That leaves ~13.5k cases that'd be attributed to all other spread vectors, or an overall spread of 0.0397 per 100,000 (assuming a US population of 342 million) amongst non-MMSC infected.

For Russia, I can't find the data broken out (at least not in an English language article), but to make sure I'm doing an apples to apples comparison in next block, that's an overall spread of 0.113 per 100k for US.

According to Wikipedia, "by the beginning of the 21st century" Russia's spread of HIV hit 157 cases per 100k people. Article also says "The HIV incidence rate increased from 187.3 to 472 cases per 100,000 people between 2007 and 2017", but that feels....absurdly high. I want to say that's for a specific region, but it is, its not clear which region it involves.

Point is, we appear to be looking at a 3+ order of magnitude difference between the spread in U.S. vs Russia. Additionally, it looks like Russia's spread is primarily due to contaminated needles when doing drugs - don't want to speculate too hard when I'm not an expert on the matter, but that speaks to a national "moral" problem to me (at least that is orders of magnitude worse than in U.S.).

I'm def bothered by the best sources I can dredge up coming from Wikipedia (I've always found it to be directionally correct, though often glossing over finer points which then leads me to wrong conclusions); which is to say, if you can point me to some better / more directly sourced (preferably English language) data on the matter, I'd be very interested to look it over.