MOSCOW—Nika Ivanova was 18 when she first learned about HIV. By then, it was too late.

Sitting in a sterile clinic here on a sunny winter day—the late singer Freddie Mercury’s birthday, of all days—the doctor told her she would likely die, and that it was her own fault.

“I became a person of a second class,” the now 33-year-old psychologist told me as she brushed her short brown bob away from her eyes. “He assumed I was a drug addict or a prostitute.”

But Ivanova was neither. Like most of her friends, the teenager who dreamed of one day becoming a doctor had never learned about safe sex or sexually transmitted diseases, in school or at home. She thought people contracted HIV only through unsafe drug use.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/25/russia-hiv-aids-epidemic-social-conservatism-orthodox-church-217011