Putin tells officials to spread word on AIDS danger

By Oliver Bullough

MOSCOW – President Vladimir Putin ordered officials on Friday to tell Russians about the dangers of AIDS, as the Kremlin pours new money into tackling a disease experts say it has failed to take seriously enough.

Russia’s levels of HIV-infection are nothing like as high as in sub-Saharan Africa, but health charities say the proportion of infected Russians has nearly doubled since 2001.

"According to official figures, the number of HIV-infected people has exceeded 342,000, and experts think it is much higher. In the main these are people below 30 years old," Putin told a gathering of top officials.

"We need to constantly explain to people the danger and high risk of catching HIV. Above all, it is important to work with high-risk groups. So far we do not have a common strategy of this."

This year Russia is to spend $175 million on HIV/AIDS programs, up from $5 million last year.

President Vladimir Putin has promised to put AIDS high on the agenda when leaders of the Group of Eight meet in Russia later this year.

A U.N. report in 2004 said AIDS could kill 20 million Russians and cost 14 percent of GDP by the middle of the century if Moscow did not do more to fight the disease, which has no cure.

The report said the epidemic was now spreading faster in eastern Europe than anywhere else in the world.

Charities say groups that have been traditionally seen as being at low risk are now contracting the disease in growing numbers.

In Moscow in 2000, drug use caused over 80 percent of infections and heterosexual sex just 10 percent. By 2004 the proportions were nearly half and half.

But HIV is still little understood in Russia, which was closed to immigration under Communist rule and hence affected later than other European countries.

The disease is often seen as a foreign import that affects only drug abusers and prostitutes.

A Russian Orthodox archbishop this week was quoted as saying that a church-run HIV treatment center in Moscow had proved that prayer could cure HIV-positive people if "they restore harmony between soul and body."

This week, the Moscow City Council moved to ask Putin to ban foreign health charities from AIDS projects in the capital because their handing out of free condoms and clean needles for injecting drugs undermined Russians’ morality.

But Putin said foreign assistance was crucial to stopping the disease becoming an epidemic and hitting Russia’s already declining population numbers.

"At the moment, this is a concentrated illness, with the infection mainly in a few risk groups. But there is a risk of the infection leaving these groups," he said.