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HIV/AIDS, TB rates sap Russian healthMOSCOW — Russia considers itself a robust member of the global community, keeping pace with heavyweights such as the United States and China. But when it comes to health, the world’s largest country is more in the company of Botswana. A global health study that compares the health toll of various diseases with 1990 data reports that in 2010, HIV/AIDS was the third-largest cause of premature death in Russia, where the number of cases has been growing rapidly. In a measure of years of life lost (with deaths among younger people given more weight in the calculation than deaths among older ones), Russia is faring similarly to Gabon and Botswana, although Russia’s top two killers remain heart disease and stroke, just as they were in 1990. “If you look at the story of Russia, particularly for Russian males, the profile of disease is dramatically different than in other developed countries,” said Christopher J.L. Murray, who led the recently completed Global Burden of Disease Study 2010. When the study grouped countries by income, Russia was compared to 14 others, including the Baltics, Lebanon, Libya, Mexico and Botswana. On many measures, Botswana did better than Russia, but they were close on premature deaths from HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis and on life expectancy — 68.9 in Russia in 2010 and 71 in Botswana. “When you put together the leading causes, it’s remarkable that HIV/AIDS is third,” said Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle. In the United States, it is No. 23. Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered his government to make improving health and life expectancy a priority, and campaigns have been started to encourage people to cut down on tobacco and alcohol — a formidable enough challenge in a country where 60 percent of men smoke and, until recently, beer was classified as food. The battle against HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis is far more daunting. Russia had 471,676 registered cases of HIV/AIDS in 2008, according to the Russian Federal AIDS Center, and 703,781 by November 2012. That figure is considered far short of the real one. Officials here estimate that about 1.2 million people are HIV- positive but that many are not counted because they have not been tested. Activists say the real number may be twice as large. “Most people are stigmatized and are afraid to go to the hospital,” said Anya Sarang, president of the Andrey Rylkov Foundation for Health and Social Justice, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to helping HIV/AIDS patients. “Doctors say by the time people get into the medical system, they already have advanced stages of HIV and tuberculosis,” she said. Grim statistics Until 2008, Sarang said, 80 percent of HIV infections were connected to intravenous drug use. “Now the main route is heterosexual transmission among drug users and their partners,” she said. Other countries try to prevent HIV infection by providing needle exchanges to reduce harm and getting users off drugs by relying on substitutes such as methadone. But here, methadone is illegal. Russia’s “narcologists” — experts in addiction — insist that substitutes will only perpetuate dependency and disease. Source: The Washington Post |
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