Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2009. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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Associated Press (10.29.09) - Thursday, October 29, 2009
Douglas Birch
Russia's chief public health official, Gennady Onishchenko, said the country is "emphatically against" methadone substitution therapy, and he criticized needle-exchange programs (NEPs) as encouraging drug use and HIV infections. Health officials in the country want to promote healthy lifestyles, said Onishchenko, who blamed rising infections on a poppy boom in Afghanistan over the past decade.
"International studies show that an abstinence-based message on drug use or sex simply doesn't work," said Robin Gorna, executive director of the International AIDS Society. In Russia, "it does appear that ideology is getting in the way of public health care policy," she said.
Russian officials "have never really embraced" NEPs, free condom distribution, and other harm-reduction methods, said Chris Beyrer, director of Johns Hopkins' AIDS International Training and Research Program. "It is the reason I think that they continue to have one of the most severe epidemics in the region," he said.
Some 75 NEPs in Russia are funded chiefly by international donors, and 22 were shuttered in August after their grants from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria expired, said Gorna. Regions where NEPs have operated have experienced slower HIV transmission rates than the rest of Russia, she and other experts said.
Russia has 13 percent of the world's heroin users, and they consume about one-fifth of the heroin used worldwide each year, according to an October UN Office on Drug Control report. The country has 501,000 registered HIV cases; the UN estimates Russia actually has 1.1 million HIV cases.
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