Moscow Now Facing ‘Triple Epidemic’ of Respiratory Diseases with Fewer Resources to Fight it Because of Money Being Spent on War in Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 23 – Russia now faces “a tridemic,” the combination of rapidly rising rates of glue, upper respiratory infections, and COVID, without even the medical resources it had against the latter three and four years ago because of Putin’s healthcare optimization and his use of funds from medical services to fight his war in Ukraine.

            And because of this conjunction of developments, that country is seeing an explosive growth in these infections, as the result both of immigration from places where the rates were already high and the increasing costs and shortages of medicines to fight these infections, Academician Gennady Onishchenko says (nakanune.ru/articles/121747/).        

            As a result, in 48 of the federal subjects, epidemic conditions exist, with the number of infections there continuing to rise and the disease spreading and increasing in others, he says. Statistics are often hard to come by, but one measure of how bad things are becoming concerns the spread of whooping cough, an illness often linked to these upper respiratory infections.

            Onischhenko says that their number in Russia has risen from 1100 in 2021, the first year of the covid pandemic, to 27,800 in 2023 and continues to go up. (For a detailed discussion of Putin's shift of government spending from health needs to the war, see istories.media/news/2024/01/24/rossiya-sokratila-raskhodi-na-zakupku-lekarstv-v-2023-godu-sekonomlennie-sredstva-mogli-pereraspredelit-na-nuzhdi-armii/.)