Russia's HIV/AIDS called 'time bomb'

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/world/2636214

Russia's HIV/AIDS called 'time bomb'
Alarming number of children born with infection
By MARK McDONALD
Knight-Ridder Tribune News

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- With a blue spoon in one tiny fist, a wedge of brown bread in the other and a plate of cottage cheese in front of her, Cristina is a happy little girl.

She's blissfully unaware -- and there's surely no reason to tell her -- that her heroin-addicted mother abandoned her at birth. No reason for Cristina to know that she's HIV-positive, part of a new class of children in Russia. No reason for her to know that she probably won't live long enough to read a book or ride a bike.

Cristina is just the tiniest part of Russia's HIV/AIDS catastrophe, the virtually unchecked horror that's turning the old Soviet Union into the new southern Africa.

The epidemic reached Russia about 10 years after it hit the West, but with an estimated 1.5 million Russians now infected, HIV and AIDS are racing through the country faster than anywhere else in the world.

from the Potemkin villages to give ole Catherine the peace of mind to keep building herself lavish palaces to the Despots of Communism. Each and every time the Russian people have had people in charge that just don't give a freaking shit.

However this can be said for many countries. Look at the crisis/tinderbox/volcano in Africa.

Most public health initiatives have been abandoned, and public health has been "privatized" to the extent that 85 million people had no insurance at some point in the last two years. The US is a time bomb, too, just waiting for another epidemic of a serious flu or other disease to explode. Preventive care is not being delivered to most working poor, which increasingly means most of us. Medicaid for the destitute is being underfunded with an eye toward privatizing it and UNfunding it. The whole system has been understaffed as profit became more important than the delivery of health care in and of itself. The system is ripe for a new disease to come along and overwhelm it. Money will not insulate anybody from the coming disaster.

The shortsightedness and stupidity of both big parties regarding public health is astonishing.

Something needs to be done about it. People who have it need to stop spreading it. If it continues going at this rate we will have a huge epidemic on our hands.

It has been estimated that 75% of people infected don't know it; further we have an administration (along with the Roman Catholic Church) that spreads mistruths about condom effectiveness.

Education and behaviour remain the key.

and people will lie or live in extreme denial about drugs.
your post exhibits the kind of attitude that's part of the problem.
there is no black and white answer -- just continuous hard work at education every day. and willingness to tweek the message to match the passing of time.

Well, sure, they do, except a lot of them don't know that they have it, or don't really understand how it's spread, and the medical/educational infrastructure is far from sufficient when it comes to inciting people to get tested and educating them. This goes for both Russian and Africa. Also in some parts of South Africa there is a strong folk belief that sex with a virgin cures AIDS. What do you think the results of that one are?

of the most ignorant nations regarding AIDS/HIV

I remember sad attempts at public awareness campaigns about SPID (AIDS in Russian) in the early 90s, but they were half-assed and weren't really integrated into education in schools. Not that here is much better. But sex education (in terms of the absolute necessity of condoms) is far worse in Russia. People just don't use condoms.