The demonstrators hold placards: ”Ministry of Health is a slaughterer for HIV infected”, “Words and promises will not stop HIV infection!”
One of the biggest news of this month in Russia was the publication of information about the growing HIV epidemic in Yekaterinburg (population of 1,349,772), the fourth-largest city in Russia and the administrative center of industrial Sverdlovsk region. Yekaterinburg is located in Ural mountains, on the border of Europe and Asia.
Tatiana Savinova, the first deputy head of the city’s health department, informed journalists during her press conference that almost every 50th resident of Yekaterinburg is infected with HIV, adding that outbreaks are considered an epidemic when the infection rate reaches 1% – a threshold that has already been surpassed in Yekaterinburg.
Most of the cases (52%) are people who use drugs; the other 46% of residents contracted HIV through sexual contact. City’s health authorities stress the growth of incidence among people over 30 and the fact that “the infection moved into prosperous social environment.”
Sverdlovsk tops the list of Russian regions afflicted by HIV. In the first nine months of 2016, the HIV infection rate stood at 118.2 per 100,000 people.
The news from Yekaterinburg triggered a Russian media discussion about the growing HIV problem throughout Russia.
The number of registered HIV-positive Russians surpassed one million in January, almost doubling since 2011. Speaking to the press, Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova admitted that this number may reach 2.5 million by 2020.
The current rate of HIV is less than 1% of the country’s population of 143 million. It seems miniscule in comparison to South Africa’s estimated 12.2% and Botswana’s 17.6%. But these nations’ epidemics have been contained and are on their way down, while Russia is among the top 10 countries with the fastest-growing incidence of HIV/AIDS.
AIDS claims 300 new victims a day, or almost 30,000 deaths a year.
According to the latest UNAIDS (United Nations Program on HIV and AIDS) report Eastern Europe and Central Asia are the only regions in the world where the HIV epidemic continues to spread rapidly. In 2015 in these regions Russia accounted for 80% of new cases of HIV. Another 15% of the new cases accounted collectively in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Tajikistan and Ukraine.
As for the spreading of the epidemic, Russia has outpaced even the countries of South Africa. Meanwhile, Russian authorities have not only failed to increase funding for the procurement of medicines for patients, but according to reports from the regions, even cut back.
Analyzing statistics published by UNAIDS, Russian web site Gazeta.ru came to the conclusion that Russia is leading in terms of the spread of HIV not only in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but in the entire world.
The new HIV cases in 2015 in Russia constituted more than 11% of the total number of people living with HIV (95,500 and 824,000, respectively, according to the Federal AIDS Center). In the vast majority of African countries, the number of new cases is not more than 8%. In 2015 for the largest countries of South America the proportion was around 5% to the total number of patients.
The speed of increase of new HIV cases in 2015 in Russia is higher then in such African countries as Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda.
Of all African countries only Nigeria had higher proportion of new cases.
In the largest Latin American countries: Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, the percentage of new HIV infected has remained at the level of 5% of the total number of carriers. For example, in Brazil, where the number of people living with HIV, about the same as in Russia (830.000), in 2015 only 44.000 were infected. (95,500 in Russia)
In the US, where there are 1.5 times more people living with HIV than in Russia, each year about 50.000 people become ill, less than half of the Russia.
UNAIDS experts see the main cause of the situation in Russia is that Russia has lost international support for programs against HIV and did not provide for adequate prevention in the national budget.
In the years 2004-2013 the largest donor for HIV prevention in the region (Eastern Europe and Central Asia) remained the Global Fund, but subsequently the World Bank re-classified Russia as a high-income country. Thus international support was gone, and the internal funding for HIV had not provided adequate coverage of the therapy necessary to prevent the transition from HIV to AIDS and to provide infection prevention.
The amount of the Global Fund HIV grants totaled more than $ 200 million, said Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the Federal AIDS Center:
“This money financed a lot of prevention and treatment programs. After our government returned the money to the Global Fund, it has focused mainly on the funding for treatment, and nobody is financing prevention programs”.
According to Ministry of Health data, the necessary medications are now received only by 37% of patients who are under observation. According to the data of the Federal AIDS Center, this is only 28% of the total number of patients.
Medication is prescribed only in the cases of a critical decrease in immunity of HIV-infected. It does not meet the World Health Organization’s recommendation to treat all patients immediately after the detection of the virus.
Independent Russian experts and HIV activists claim that the epidemic is fueled by the Kremlin’s policies, or, rather, its abandonment of internationally accepted prevention methods such as sex education in schools, distribution of condoms to sex workers, and providing clean needles and methadone therapy for drug addicts.
Internationally accepted prevention methods are aggressively opposed by the activists of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose role in the Russian life keeps growing.
Moreover, the trend accelerated after the Kremlin’s attack on the foreign-funded NGOs. In 2012, Russia adopted the law that requires foreign-funded NGOs to register as “foreign agents”, and the Justice Ministry has listed some 100 groups as such. These groups are frequently audited, denied registration with authorities, their offices searched, and their staff detained, arrested and interrogated. Many have been forced to close. In late June, the Andrei Rylkov Foundation, the only NGO distributing clean needles to drug addicts in Moscow, was listed as a “foreign agent.”
Anna Sarang, the head of the Andrei Rylkov Foundation, stated that Putin’s government is “directly sabotaging HIV prevention by not allocating its own funds and blocking the work of international donors and Russian NGOs”.
