Associated Press - Wednesday November 27, 2002
Eric Engleman, Associated Press Writer

Some 43,000 new HIV cases were registered in Russia in the first 11 months of 2002, down more than 50 percent from the 87,000 registered last year, but the official statistics are misleading, said Vadim Pokrovsky, director of the Center for AIDS Prevention and Treatment.

He said the Russian Health Ministry had stopped paying for HIV tests, forcing individual regions to pick up the costs themselves. That means fewer Russians are being tested and thus a large number of HIV-infected people are not being registered.

While the official total of HIV cases stands at 220,545, Pokrovsky estimated that between 800,000 and 1.2 million Russians are currently infected. The vast majority of them are young people between the ages of 15 and 30.

"If the epidemic continues at the current pace, it will inflict serious damage on the national economy" by taking some of Russia's most productive people - from the youngest generation - out of the work force, he said.

Most HIV infections in Russia are associated with intravenous drug use, but a small but growing proportion are sexually transmitted, and the disease is poised to explode among the general population, he said. Half a million Russians could die of AIDS by the year 2010, he said.

AIDS appeared relatively late in the Soviet Union, but has grown steadily in Russia since the 1991 Soviet collapse. The number of HIV infections jumped dramatically in 1999 and had expanded rapidly until this year.

The Moscow region continues to have the largest number of officially registered HIV infections, followed by Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains, St. Petersburg, Russia's second largest city, and Samara in central Russia.

Pokrovsky said the problem in Sverdlovsk is particularly acute because the region is close to the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan and receives a steady flow of heroin and other drugs, which fall into the hands of intravenous drug users. Formerly Soviet Central Asia is a key gateway for Afghan heroin.

Pokrovsky said the Russian government devotes only a small percent of the budget to the problem. Each year, 100 million rubles (US$3.1 million) goes to treating HIV, including the purchase of expensive medicines, while only 25 million rubles (US$781,000) goes to prevention. That is only a "few kopecks per person," not nearly enough to mount large-scale education programs, Pokrovsky said.

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