It was reported in 1999 that HIV infections in the former Soviet Union have doubled in just two years. Injecting drug use gave the Eastern European and Central Asian region the world's steepest HIV curve in 1999. Drug-injecting is also a major concern in the industrialized countries, as it is in the Middle East, where total AIDS cases are still relatively low but drug-injecting accounted for two-thirds of cases in Bahrain, half in the Islamic Republic of Iran and over a third in Tunisia.