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A Russian HIV charity to prevent the spread of the virus among homosexual men received an exceptional federal grant to operate in Yekaterinburg.
The grant of about 100,000 rubles (£ 1,200) to charity workers involved in the project "To live". Charity workers can approach people at nightclubs and offer them an HIV test and, if the result is positive, offer to accompany them to a local AIDS center. Part of the money will be spent renting a room near the center.
"It is a highly discriminated group, and it is difficult to find money," said project director Nadezhda Dernova. "To be honest, I did not think we would have received the grant, but the guys who worked with me were confident we were going to get it," she added.
The
A Russian boy holds a placard on which one can read "Stop AIDS" during a march in the center of Moscow on December 1, 2005 marking World AIDS Day (Photo: Denis Sinyakov / AFP / Getty Images) in Yekaterinburg, the country's fourth-largest city located east of the Ural Mountains, said an HIV "epidemic" in 2016 after estimating that 1.8 percent of local residents were infected with the virus. The majority of cases, 52%, were due to drug use, while in 46% of cases, the virus spread through unprotected sexual contact.
The Russian authorities are generally reluctant to publicly discuss the scale of the public health crisis, even though the problem continues to grow. Last year, the country recorded the third largest number of new HIV cases in the world, behind South Africa and Nigeria.
Yet, in 2017, the Russian government refused to allocate additional funds to combat the spread of HIV. patients, limiting the amount to 17.5 billion rubles (£ 210 million). The director of the Russian Federal Center for AIDS Control, Vadim Pokrovsky, told Radio Free Europe that it took at least five times that amount for effective prevention and treatment.
"The budget [de[current] allows only 300,000 people to seek treatment," he said: "The Government and the State Duma [the Russian legislative assembly] must dramatically increase this budget if it does not want tens of thousands of people to die."
A lack of funding is not the only obstacle to the fight against the epidemic in the country. The World Health Organization warned four years ago that "repressive laws on drugs and homosexuality" would have a negative impact on the fight against HIV
. Melkovsky, said at the present time that the health crisis has been compounded by the stigma and discrimination associated with the virus and the disease. "We are losing the war on HIV in Yekaterinburg," he said. "There is a story about the epidemic in Yekaterinburg, the huge number of people living with HIV, and another story of stigma and discrimination. function (d, s, id) {
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