But for Russia, the arrival of AIDS amounts to another blow at a time when the country's collective health is already under devastating assault by epidemics of tuberculosis, syphilis and hepatitis. The health crisis has pushed life expectancy for Russian men below 60 years and contributed to a falling population, even as other major industrialized countries continue to grow.
The spread of disease is tied in part to the burgeoning drug problem that has developed since the fall of the Soviet Union. The government reports that drug addiction has multiplied 12 times over the past decade and attributes 80 percent to 90 percent of the HIV infections to dirty needles. Hepatitis B and C, which are transmitted through blood and sexual activity, have risen rapidly as well. "Basically these epidemics are feeding each other," Fidler said.
From:
washingtonpost.com
December 5, 2000
Infectious Diseases Rising Again in Russia
By ABIGAIL ZUGER
Excerpt:
Russia's political turmoil, its economic crisis and its new freedoms have been accompanied by a wave of old diseases. Tuberculosis is flooding the country, producing what some authorities are calling the world's largest outbreak of the drug-resistant variety, one of medicine's most ominous problems.
Rates of other infections, including hepatitis, syphilis and AIDS, are skyrocketing. An epidemic of diphtheria swept through in the mid-1990's. Reports of smaller, regional outbreaks of encephalitis, typhoid fever, malaria, polio, pneumonia and influenza pepper the nightly news.
Health experts describe Russia's prison system as an "epidemiologic pump," continuously seeding the country with pockets of tuberculosis that can spread on their own. Increasingly, TB cases of Russian origin are turning up in the Baltic countries and even farther afield - for instance, Germany and Israel.
Specialists worry that if the rising rates of infectious diseases in Russia continue unabated, the country itself may turn into an epidemiologic pump, sending infectious diseases into the rest of the world.
[...]
nytimes.com
And now, think of all those prostitutes coming from Russia... Do you think their blood gets tossed away as well? |
