MOSCOW, Dec 1 (AFP) - Russians must overcome their rejection of patients suffering from HIV-AIDS, the head of Russia's epidemiological services, Deputy Health Minister Gennady Onishchenko, said Monday on World AIDS day.
"One of the main problems in Russia is the stigmatisation of people who are HIV-positive, their rejection by society, the reaction of the man in the street in which children are turned away from schools and even from medical establishments," Onishchenko told a press conference.
"The health ministry is obliged to draw up anonymous statistics of the HIV-positive because we fear for the fate of these people if their names become known. Society has to change its attitude towards them," he said.
Official statistics set the number of HIV and AIDS sufferers in Russia at 257,000, though this is widely considered to represent barely a quarter of the true figure.
There are some 15,000 HIV-AIDS sufferers in Moscow and 21,000 in Saint Petersburg, according to official figures, while the worst-hit regions outside the present and former Russian capitals are Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk in the Urals, Samara in the Volga region and Kursk in western Russia.
Russian authorities are growing increasingly concerned at the spread of HIV-AIDS among women of child-bearing age -- one quarter of all those infected come into this category, Onishchenko said.
As of mid-November, some 302 children had been born to infected mothers, and many of them had been abandoned subsequently, he said.
Onishchenko noted that sexual relations as opposed to intravenous drug abuse was increasingly the cause the spread of the immune-deficiency virus.
Projections for 2004 indicate that between 5,000 and 7,000 people will need medical treatment, although the high cost of the medication, between 8,000 and 10,000 dollars a year, means that the majority of them will not receive it.
The head of the state AIDS prevention centre Vadim Pokrovsky said Monday that the federal budget allocates just 27 million rubles (910,000 dollars, 760,000 euros) to AIDS prevent, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported.
An opinion poll published Monday by the ROMIR survey institute showed that more than 50 percent of Russians see the epidemic as a growing threat to the country, but that 59 percent were unaware that December 1 was World AIDS Day.
The Canadian ambassador to Russia, Christopher Westdal, said Ottawa could supply Russia with cheap generic drugs to fight AIDS, produced with the agreement of the World Trade Organisation.
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