- Russia paced at a truly high tempo towards the world
day of combating AIDS, which is marked annually on December 1. If 10 years
ago we considered AIDS to be some overseas African infection, now, according
to the medical statistics, in some Russian cities (in Irkutsk, for example)
there is no doorway without drug addicts injecting drugs and no street
without an AIDS-infected person living in it.
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- Readers of a local newspaper write to the editorial office:
"Who has made this bedlam here? Who has brought AIDS to Irkutsk? Is
there any investigation underway?"
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- And everything turns out to be simple. The newspaper
answers: "A blood sample has been recently sent to the D.I.Ivanov
Moscow Institute of Virology to find out from whence AIDS came to Irkutsk.
When they identify the type of our HIV, it will be clear where it was brought
from: Ukraine, Byelorussia, Azerbaijan, etc. (a wide choice)".
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- Such touching artlessness of either journalists or the
local AIDS-control bodies looks simply blasphemous.
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- At the parliamentary hearings "On Package Measures
to Prevent and Control the Disease Caused by the Human Immunodefiency Virus
(AIDS) in the Russian Federation" held recently in the State Duma,
it was pointed out that, according to the WHO, now in the world there are
about 33 million HIV-infected persons. Almost 6 million people from this
amount, or about 20 %, got infected last year. Every minute 6 young people
on the planet catch an HIV infection. The HIV situation that shaped in
the Russian Federation should not be considered in isolation from what
is happening in the world.
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- Here is what Academician of the Russian Academy of Medical
Sciences (RAMS) Vadim Pokrovski, Head of the Federal Centre for Prevention
and Control of AIDS, said:
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- Now in this country they register about a thousand new
HIV cases every week. 40 thousand HIV-infected persons have already been
identified since the beginning of the year. These are just registered cases,
actually up to 10 thousand persons catch the infection every week. And
now it is a task for a third grade pupil to count the number of the infected
in this country. It makes about 430 thousand. In other words, from 400
to 500 thousand our compatriots are already infected with the human immunnodeficiency
virus. In the USA the number of the HIV-infected is from 1 to 2 million
people, and we habitually consider this to be a really serious problem
in the United States.
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- In Russia, unfortunately, combating AIDS is still regarded
only as medical problem, and doctors are considered guilty of spreading
the disease.
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- As the author of these lines was told in an interview
with Academician of the RAMS Sergei Kolesnikov, the State Duma deputy from
Irkutsk, who also participated in the hearings, it is not doctors dealing
with just a small tail of the AIDS problem in the form a geometrically
growing number of the HIV-infected who should be responsible for the problem
but the state in the person of its rulers. That is why, unless a national
committee to control the epidemic is set up, the situation will further
aggravate. Even those meagre funds, which are allocated, are frittered
away. There is no integral strategy of combating AIDS. And today, as before,
this problem is tackled practically only by doctors and law-enforcement
bodies.
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- Irkutsk, the record holder for the disease growth rates,
stands by itself among the Russian regions. With a population of 680 thousand
people, this Siberian city is only 20 % behind the ten-million Moscow as
for the number of the HIV-infected and has surpassed two times over the
port city of Kaliningrad and the Krasnodar territory, which borders on
the traditionally dangerous Caucasus. What is the reason for this Irkutsk
phenomenon?
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- In the pinion of Sergei Kolesnikov, the matter is that
the Irkutsk local health authorities have made a great number of mistakes
and, as a result, let the epidemic situation out of control.
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- The management of the AntiAIDS Centre started tackling
the tasks, which were of benefit to the Centre but not to the city residents.
The most financially lucrative task is diagnostics, i.e. the application
of test systems. When test systems are bought, the grateful companies help
those who became their customers. The agents get their lawful 10 %. The
second aspect for the Irkutsk specialists to concentrate their efforts
on was anonymous examination. How can one keep record of funds that get
to a certain establishment in cases of anonymous examination? And the issues
of preventive work were given minimum attention at that. Though, as Sergei
Kolesnikov says, in the first place there should be preventive work in
the form of a sound youth policy, solutions to social problems and employment
and leisure problems; in the second place - preventive work in the form
of popularisation of hygienic standards and protection techniques; and
in third place - diagnostics and treatment. To be exact, one may omit treatment
in the conditions of Russia as it costs USD 10,000 per patient a year.
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- In Irkutsk, they have committed all their efforts to
general diagnostics of the population. The head of the Centre, Nadezhda
Zaznobova, acted as arbitrarily as she wished with the complete connivance
of the authorities. Her incompetence was subject for telling legends in
the city, but the administration, evidently, believed that the regional
AIDS problem was attended to and, consequently, there was nothing to worry
about.
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- The head of the AntiAIDS Centre has even convinced the
administration to allocate money to build a separate huge building for
the Centre in Irkutsk to where the inhabitants will come for diagnostics
from the entire region occupying, by the way, 800 thousand square kilometres.
A pretty penny was invested in the project, and then the authorities, as
the saying goes, chose both of the two evils: the construction works were
frozen. The centre is non-existent. And the money, which could be used
for preventive measures, is now lying snow-covered as a procrastinated
building project everybody is so well familiar with since the Soviet times.
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- The Irkutsk authorities, one should say, demonstrate
somewhat queer methods of combating the AIDS epidemic. On the one hand,
the Irkutsk government has forbidden the city blood transfusion station
to accept donors under 30, thus trying to secure from spreading the infection.
Such restrictions are not found anywhere else in Russia. On the other hand,
the Irkutsk region, only because of its authorities' negligence, was not
included in the international UN AIDS-control program comprising 19 Russian
territories, which are much safer in comparison with Irkutsk.
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- One thing is absolutely sure, the Irkutsk phenomenon
would not exist if this country's top leadership's treatment of the AIDS
problem were different. At hearings, they made public the figures that
our membership fee to the UN is greater than the funds allocated to finance
the AIDS program in the Russian Federation. What can we talk about? May
be about AIDS being absent in this country? There is no funding, so there
is no problem.
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- By the way, academician Pokrovski said at a news conference
recently that today the rates of spreading AIDS are higher in Russia than
in Africa.
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