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New Campaign Tackles HIV/AIDS Prejudice

By Galina Stolyarova

Staff Writer

Stay Human, a major nationwide campaign aimed at battling a prejudice against HIV-positive people, arrived in St. Petersburg last week with advertisements calling for greater understanding among the general public.

“HIV isn’t transmited via friendship,” is the motto of the campaign, which has been organized by a number of Russian humanitarian foundations, including the Russian Coordination Council for HIV-Positive People and local charity foundation Delo. The campaign will last for three months.

Yevgenia Alexeyeva, director of the Moscow-based Focus-Media Foundation and a co-organizer of the project, said she was astonished by the widespread misconceptions about HIV/AIDS in Russian society.

“We conducted a poll in ten regions of Russia just before the start of this campaign, and were stunned by the results,” Alexeyeva said. “Seventy percent of the poll’s participants believe that HIV can be transmitted through mosquito bites! Of course, this is not true.”

According to Alexeyeva’s research, 56 percent of respondents believe that HIV can be caught by kissing an infected person, and 40 percent said HIV can be transmited by coughing and sneezing. Over half of the poll’s participants are convinced that it is possible to get infected when you share an office/workplace with an HIV-positive person.

Alexander Rumyantsev, head of the St. Petersburg Humanitarian Foundation Delo which provides support to local HIV-positive people, said that, for many years, fear has been the only prevention measure against the disease in Russia.

“Scary articles and TV reports did much to reinforce the stigma,” he said. “And it will take years to get rid of it. But I am against breaking stereotypes fast. Breaking [stereotypes] is always traumatic. It’s best to keep up a continued, widespread but non-aggressive campaign.”

Until recently, most people infected with the HIV virus in Russia had little chance to get therapy, but the situation has changed dramatically this year.

President Vladimir Putin announced in September of last year that the 2006 federal AIDS budget would be 20 to 30 times higher than in 2005.

Russia has increased funding for HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention programs from 130 million rubles ($4.5 million) in 2004 — enough to treat just 600 patients — to 3 billion rubles ($140 million) this year.

However, therapy alone can’t solve the problem. Even with more treatment being made available, not everyone is rushing to get help, experts say. Those who believe they may be infected know that once the diagnosis is confirmed, they will endure hatred and isolation that, in Russia, go hand in hand with the medical symptoms of the illness. Even when alarming symptoms occur and therapy becomes vital to their health, many people prefer not to be registered and postpone dealing with doctors.

“The degree of discrimination is horrendous, even the doctors who inform you about the diagnosis or are supposed to give you therapy often act in the most unpleasant way,” said Alexander Volgin, head of the Northwestern branch of the Russian Coordination Council For HIV-Positive people. “When I was diagnosed with HIV in 2000, nobody even told me about the existence of therapy in principle.”

Volgin said doctors are often guilty of the same prejudices. “It is not uncommon for an ambulance to refuse to help HIV-positive people,” he said. “When they arrive on the scene and find out a patient has HIV, not all of them stay and provide medical assistance.”

The number of HIV infections per 100,000 people has nearly doubled in the past five years, from 121 in 2001 to 231 by the end of 2005, the Federal Service for the Supervision of Consumer Rights and Human Welfare said in a statement in December. Russia is facing gloomy forecasts from the international experts of the World Health Organization, who warn that up to one third of the country’s population may be wiped out by the virus within the next 50 years.

But the country’s chief sanitary doctor Gennady Onishchenko warns that not all the pessimistic forecasts are to be believed.

“In 1997, there were forecasts that in ten years’ time there will be between five and seven million HIV-positive people in Russia,” he said during an international conference on HIV/AIDS issues in Suzdal in October. “But now, according to the boldest unofficial estimates, there are not more than one million of them in the country. We have done better than the worst-case scenario and we are battling on.”

Since 2002, between 3,000 and 4,500 new cases have been registered annually in St. Petersburg. According to official statistics, 27,602 HIV cases were registered in the city between January 1987 and October 2005.

According to statistics for the whole of Russia, almost 50 percent of cases result from sexual contract. In St. Petersburg, however, the picture is different. Galina Volkova, an official with the St. Petersburg Center For AIDS Prevention, said 80 percent of new HIV cases registered in 2005 result from intravenous drug use.

“The problem is becoming more localized,” Volkova said at a news conference in December. “[In 2004] only 65 percent of new registered cases were intravenous drug addicts.”

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