AIDS is spreading in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a

AIDS is spreading in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, especially among marginalized youth, according to warnings from United Nations advocates at this week's International HIV/AIDS Conference in Vienna.

Rates of HIV in the region, which includes Russia and Georgia, have been climbing for much of the past decade.

The illness afflicted about 1.5 million people in 2008, according to the U.N. That represents a 66 percent increase over seven years.

"Eastern Europe and Central Asia are the only parts of the world where the HIV epidemic remains clearly on the rise," reads the report, published by UNICEF on Monday.

And diagnoses of HIV are anticipated to have increased yet again in 2009. Belarus, most notably, is reporting a 22 percent rise in rates of HIV. In some areas of Russia, rates have surged 400 percent in the past decade.

Experts have also identified key transmission trends. Intravenous drug users, especially those age 15 to 24, are contracting HIV and then passing it onto sexual partners and, eventually, offspring.