AIDS Expert Flays Kremlin, Says Russia’s HIV Epidemic Worsening
by AFP
Moscow — Russia’s top AIDS expert lambasted the Kremlin’s increasingly conservative agenda Thursday, saying the HIV epidemic is worsening and at least two million Russians are likely to be infected in about five years.
Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the country’s state AIDS center, said the Kremlin’s policies promoting traditional family values had failed to halt the spread of the deadly virus.
“The last five years of the conservative approach have led to the doubling of the number of HIV-infected people,” he told AFP in an interview.
“It has not justified itself,” Pokrovsky said, noting that the official number of Russians with HIV has grown to some 930,000 people from around 500,000 in 2010.
President Vladimir Putin, who enjoys unstinting support from the Russian Orthodox Church, has over the past years been promoting increasingly conservative values in a bid to rally support from his core constituents of middle-aged Russians and blue-collar workers.
Pokrovsky said that some 90,000 contracted HIV in Russia last year, compared with fewer than 3,000 people in Germany, which has one of the lowest rates of HIV in Europe.
He chalked up Germany’s success in fighting the disease to drug replacement therapy for addicts – banned in Russia – as well as the legalisation of prostitution and sex education in schools.
“Children are taught to use condoms there,” Pokrovsky said, indicating that was hardly imaginable in modern Russia where the Orthodox Church is growing increasingly influential.
Russia has registered more than 930,000 people with HIV, of whom some 192,000 have already died, said Pokrovsky.