A report in this week’s issue of The Lancet predicts there will soon be a major HIV/Aids epidemic in Eastern Europe. Although HIV infection rates in Eastern Europe are bad, in Russia and the former Soviet Union they are abysmal. As noted by Gus Cairns,
Editor in Chief of the British HIV and sexual health magazine Positive Nation, Russian health workers are desperately worried by the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS which has been accelerated through widespread drug use, prostitution, ignorance and official apathy. All over Russia, from St Petersburg and neighbouring Estonia in the west, thousands of miles over to Irkutsk in Siberia and throughout the Ukraine, young people are fixing up drugs and catching HIV. The HIV rate in most of these countries has doubled every year for the last four years. Recent statistics show that at least 450,000 Ukrainians are HIV positive – one per cent of the population, or 17 times the UK rate. Nearly 90% of them caught it through drug use. As a result, most also have hepatitis B and C. One recent survey found that 56% of young drug users in the mid-Russian town of Togliatti are already HIV positive, most having acquired their infection in the last two years. Three quarters of them didn’t know they had it. So far the official Russian reaction to HIV has been dismal. The Russian government spent the equivalent of $5 million on AIDS care and prevention last year, about a hundredth the United Kingdom budget for 20 times as many people with HIV.
Ilona van der Braak, who has worked on HIV in Moscow for the last seven years at the Aids Foundation East West, a non-governmental organisation founded in 2001 by Medecins san Frontieres, notes the time to take action to prevent an epidemic is running out. “We have about 10 years. Because it’s such a young epidemic we have a tiny breathing space before people start dying enmasse. We’d better pray that the former Iron Curtain countries get some help with their HIV problem before then, or the consequences to world stability could be incalculable.” Already one third of prospective Russian military conscripts have the disease. If a weakened Russia were invaded and lacked the troops to resist, they’d be forced to use…
The devastating effects of AIDS in Africa, of course, are almost beyond comprehension…