Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 17 – Over the past
30 years, 1,250,000 Russians have been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, and about
300,000 have died, according to Academician Vadim Pokrovsky; but what is most disturbing
is that their numbers continue to go up and may rise dramatically if the most
advanced medications now imported from the West become unavailable.
In 2016, the head of the Federal Center
for Prevention and the Struggle with HIV/AIDS says, doctors identified 102,200
new cases, while in 2017, they diagnosed 104,500, an increase that reflects
both better diagnostic work and the spread of the disease itself (ria.ru/society/20180417/1518771261.html).
According to Pokrovsky, the average
age of those infected has risen from 20 to 20 to “about 35” and spread from men
to women and more often by sexual congress than by drug use as was the case
earlier. The disease is spread far more
by heterosexual ties than homosexual ones, he says, because only two percent of
Russians are homosexuals.
The disease is also differentially
distributed geographically, with the Urals, Siberia and the Volga region being
the leaders followed by St. Petersburg and other port cities.
What is worrisome is that some of
the most effective medications may no longer be imported, and if that should
prove to be the case, the situation could become dire indeed. An example of the
nature of that threat is provided by Tajikistan: Twenty years ago, Dushanbe
decided to save money by not importing vaccines (forum-msk.org/material/news/14556201.html).
Now, there is a polio epidemic in
that Central Asian country, and it is spreading to Russian cities where unvaccinated
Tajik migrants are coming in large numbers (nazaccent.ru/content/27039-za-god-v-rossiyu-vehalo-bolee.html).
Something similar could happen with HIV/AIDS, analysts suggest, if anti-retorviral
drugs are no longer readily available in Russia or its neighbors.
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