AIDS experts urged Russian officials to scrap their abstinence-based strategy for curbing the spread of HIV, saying the country’s fast-growing epidemic could be entering a dangerous new phase.
AIDS specialists meeting in Moscow urged Russia on Wednesday to adopt successful strategies like offering needle-exchange programs and heroin substitutes for drug addicts.
The number of HIV infections in Russia has doubled in the past eight years and there is evidence that the virus is increasingly being spread by heterosexual sex.
The rapid growth of the epidemic in Russia is in contrast to sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia, where prevalence of the virus fell during the same eight-year period, according to the UN’s AIDS agency, UNAIDS.
Russia’s chief public health officer, Gennady Onishchenko, told a regional AIDS conference on Wednesday that Russia is “emphatically against” the use of drug replacement therapy.
Meanwhile, he criticized programs that exchange clean needles for used ones, saying such programs may promote illicit drug sales and HIV transmission.
Both are part of a so-called harm reduction strategy, in contrast to the just-say-no programs that urge abstinence from drugs and risky sex. Russian health officials say they are committed overall to a “healthy lifestyle” approach.
That isn’t good enough, experts say.
“International studies show that an abstinence-based message on drug use or sex simply doesn’t work,” said Robin Gorna, executive director of the International AIDS Society.
In Russia, she said, “it does appear that ideology is getting in the way of public health care policy.”
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