[afro-nets] Russia Not Taking HIV/AIDS Threat Seriously - Report Says

[Leela McCullough <leela@healthnet.org>]

Russia Not Taking HIV/AIDS Threat Seriously, Report Says
--------------------------------------------------------

 From UN Wire, 21 April, 2004
Wednesday, April 21, 2004

While the HIV caseload in Russia has jumped from 163 in 1994 to
an estimated 1 million by the end of last year, President Vladi-
mir Putin has taken little action to tackle the epidemic, USA
Today reported yesterday:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-04-19-russia-aids_x.htm

Although a U.N. report in February suggested that 9 million Rus-
sians could die of AIDS by 2045, government funding is only
about $4 million ­ a budget that would pay for medicine for just
600 patients a year.

Experts blame the HIV/AIDS explosion in part on Russia's margin-
alization of groups that have high HIV rates, such as drug ad-
dicts and commercial sex workers.

As many as 80 percent of the country's HIV/AIDS cases are drug-
related, but it has only 59 government centers for as many as 4
million intravenous drug users. Soviet-era prohibitions on vir-
tually all controlled substances make substitution therapy for
addicts nearly impossible and strict criminalization of drug in-
fractions puts even more AIDS sufferers behind bars.

The U.N. study found a "direct causality between the seriousness
of the AIDS crisis and the degree of respect given to human
rights," Marta Ruedas of the U.N. Development Program told USA
Today.

President Putin, meanwhile, has shown no commitment to fighting
the epidemic.

"Up to now, I am not sure that our president knows enough about
HIV/AIDS," said Vadim Pokrovsky, Russia's top AIDS researcher.
"There hasn't been a clear speech or phrase that allows us to
say that our president understands HIV/AIDS problems. Only a
very few times, maybe once or twice, he has mentioned it in his
speeches."

International organizations and foreign governments have been
more forthcoming in providing HIV/AIDS assistance to Russians.
Last year, the World Bank agreed to loan Russia $150 million to
fight AIDS and tuberculosis, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS,
Tuberculosis and Malaria has awarded nearly $90 million to five
non-governmental organizations in Russia. The government is
drafting a new grant proposal to the fund.

"It is a significant improvement for prevention," said Pok-
rovsky. "But, of course, it is necessary to get more money and
the main source is that state budget. We need to influence our
Parliament to give us more money."

To that end, diplomats and AIDS experts are pursuing a two-
pronged strategy ­ trying to convince Putin of the scale of the
crisis, perhaps by sounding alarms over its potential to harm
the economy, and building momentum through nongovernmental or-
ganizations funded by foreign donors that are reaching out to
drug addicts and other at-risk groups.

Dmitry Blagovo, who runs a program in a Moscow suburb that helps
addicts and provides them with clean needles, said the project
has become more accepted by local police and officials since its
inception.

"They [local police] hassled us for about six months until they
figured out we weren't going out into the streets to sell
drugs," he said. "After that, they seemed to decide, 'These guys
are OK.'"

Faina Guskova, a government administration adviser in the indus-
trial Moscow suburb of Mitischi, agreed that progress is being
made, at least on the local level.

"At first, we had problems," she said of the city's efforts to
combat AIDS. "People were very reluctant to admit us to schools.
The topic was forbidden, particularly if it concerned HIV infec-
tion. But now, they've become interested in it and teachers
themselves ask us to come. I guess the people's psychology is
changing."

Officials in Mitischi have been willing to taking tough measures
against HIV in part because of the suburb's longtime problems
with the virus and widespread drug addiction, according to U.N.
officials (Bill Nichols, USA Today, April 20).

"A very big increase in drug use some years ago" in St. Peters-
burg, meanwhile, has contributed to that city's unusually high
HIV rate, according to Alexander Tsekhanovich, president of the
NGO Humanitarian Action.

A joint research project conducted by Humanitarian Action and
another NGO, Stellit, as well as the St. Petersburg Pasteur In-
stitute found that 26,000 of about 260,000 Russians who are reg-
istered as HIV-positive live in St. Petersburg and that almost
half of prostitutes there are infected, nearly all of whom are
said to be drug users (Simone Kozuharov, St. Petersburg Times,
April 20):
http://www.sptimes.ru/archive/times/962/top/t_12290.htm


--
Leela McCullough, Ed.D.
Director of Information Services
SATELLIFE
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