HIV, the ‘Western disease’ that’s ravaging Siberia’s heartland

The centre of Russia’s spiralling HIV/AIDS epidemic has infection rates more than 40 times higher than in the EU.

Vladimir Putin has not spoken publicly about HIV or AIDS since 2006. Picture: AFP

An industrial region in Siberia has become the centre of Russia’s spiralling HIV/AIDS epidemic with infection rates more than 40 times higher than in the EU.

In the 1980s, Soviet officials described AIDS as a “western disease”. Yet in the decades since, the virus has claimed the lives of at least 400,000 Russians, most dying in the past decade, according to official statistics.

Kemerovo, a coalmining region 3540km east of Moscow, has the unwelcome distinction of being Russia’s worst-hit area, recording 205 new cases of HIV per 100,000 people in 2019 — a level of infection approaching sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease has caused the greatest number of deaths.

The region, one of the most politically repressive in Russia, opposition activists say, is also polluted by mining and metallurgical activity and has a general mortality rate among the country’s highest.

Russia’s first wave of HIV infections was driven by an explosion in drug use after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, 57 per cent of new cases are a result of heterosexual sex. Drug use is responsible for 40 per cent, while gay sex accounts for 3 per cent.

There are more than a million people living with HIV in Russia, according to official figures. Analysts, however, say the true figure could be as high as 1.5 million: about 1 per cent of the population. It is estimated there are 200 new infections a day and only a third of those with the virus are receiving antiretroviral therapy. In 2019, a record 37,000 Russians died of AIDS. The toll in Britain, with a little less than half the population of Russia, was 622.

Critics say the epidemic has been fuelled by conservative policies that have held sway in the Kremlin over the past decade. Despite the death toll, officials say distributing clean needles would only serve to increase drug use, while the use of methadone to wean addicts off heroin is barred. President Vladimir Putin has not spoken publicly about HIV or AIDS since 2006.

Independent groups that try to carry out harm-reduction programs by providing condoms to sex workers and needles to drug addicts have been labelled “foreign agents” because they accept overseas funding. The term has strong associations in Russia with espionage.

“We are constantly coming under pressure, being hit with fines, inspections and smears by pro-Kremlin media,” said Anya Sarang, the head of the Andrei Rylkov Foundation; the Moscow-based organisation was designated a foreign agent in 2016. Other groups have folded after being similarly targeted by the state.

“The government is unwilling to contradict Putin’s conservative ideology,” Ms Sarang said.

Sex education is banned in schools because of the opposition of the Russian Orthodox Church, a Kremlin ally, which insists that “virtue and chastity” provide the best defence against HIV.

Russia’s top official for children’s rights once said the novels of Leo Tolstoy contained everything a child needed to know about love and sex.

In 2017, plans to hold online lessons about HIV/AIDS for students were scrapped when the education ministry objected to the use of the word “condom”.

Attempts to stem the tide of new infections have been made harder by widespread fear and ­ignorance of the disease.

In July, a man in the Kemerovo region was convicted of murder after he threw a drinking buddy off a balcony because the friend told him he was HIV-positive only after they had swigged from the same bottle.

The killer’s time in prison will put him more at risk of infection — one in every four inmates in the Kemerovo region are HIV-positive, officials say. State media reports on the incident did not clarify the virus cannot be spread by sharing bottles, cups or ­utensils.

The Sunday Times