MOSCOW, March 15 (AFP) - The rise of AIDS and drugs has seen the plight of children in Russia deteriorate sharply over the decade since the collapse of communism, a UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) official said Thursday.
"Children in Russia face an acute crisis," Rosemary McCreery, UNICEF representative for Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, told a press conference.
Their situation "is now worse than 10 years ago in nearly all cases," she said.
"Many new social and economic problems" have emerged for children, and "society does not have enough resources to fight AIDS and drugs," she said.
The number of children suffering from alcoholism almost doubled between 1993 and 1999, while the number of children recorded as taking drugs multiplied by a factor of 17.5 over the same period, according to a Russian report issued Thursday.
The report, timed to coincide with a conference on children's problems organised by UNESCO and non-government organisations in Moscow on March 16-17, recorded 761 cases of HIV among children aged under 15 between 1987 and 2000, with 87 children dying of AIDS.
However the rate of infant mortality declined by 21 percent between 1993 and 2000.
McCreery said she saw "some grounds for optimism but also many grounds for concern. ... The greatest ground for concern is continuing economic and social uncertainty."
Ella Pamfilova, president of the organisation For Civil Dignity, said that the situation of children in Russia was "a blight on society."
There were 700,000 children who had been abandoned or who suffered from parental negligence, and their number is increasing by 100,000 per year, Pamfilova said. She deplored a "fall in the sense of responsibility in the family and in society."
Boris Alchuler, of the Children's Rights association, noted that in Moscow, Russia's richest city, there were 13,140 homeless children, and said the city authorities were doing little to help them.
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