Ksenia Safina and Georgii Bazykin co-authored a preprint “Molecular epidemiology of HIV-1 in Oryol Oblast, Russia” that has been recently published at medRxiv. The scientists provide a detailed description of the human immunodeficiency virus -1 (HIV-1) epidemic for one geographic region of Russia, Oryol Oblast, by collecting and sequencing viral samples from about a third of its HIV-positive population. They identified multiple introductions of HIV-1 into Oryol Oblast, resulting in 82 transmission lineages that together comprise 66% of the samples. Most introductions are of subtype A, the predominant HIV-1 subtype in Russia. In contrast to the patterns described previously in European and North American countries, there is no overrepresentation of males in transmission lineages in Russia; meanwhile, injecting drug users are overrepresented in transmission lineages. This likely reflects the structure of the HIV-1 epidemic in Russia dominated by heterosexual and, to smaller extent, IDU transmission. Full text of the preprint is available here.