AIDS Official Attacks Moscow for Giving More to UN Than at Home
Moscow has pledged 20 million dollars to the global fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, but has allocated only six million dollars from this year's health budget to prevent and treat the HIV virus that causes AIDS in Russia, AFP reported.
"I see a serious contradiction in the fact that Russia is spending one-third of the money fighting HIV inside the country than it proposes to spend on helping other countries," Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the National AIDS center was quoted as saying by Interfax.
Russian Deputy Health Minister Gennady Onishchenko did not respond to the criticism, but stressed that the government was to provide equipment and medicines rather than money for the global fund.
"We would like to make the contribution not by paying money, but for example by supplying test systems produced in Russia to CIS (ex-Soviet) countries and by supplying medicines to African countries, which are much cheaper than those produced in the West," he said.
"Some of the payments have already been made and the rest will be made soon," he added.
Russia has the world's fastest-growing rate of HIV, with an average 1,000 to 2,000 new cases every week, according to Pokrovsky, who regularly pleads for extra funds to combat the deadly disease.
A million Russians are infected with HIV, the virus that causes aids, five times the official number of registered cases, which stands at 200,000, he says. Russia has 144 million inhabitants.
The United Nations's top AIDS official Peter Piot warned earlier this year that the epidemic in Russia was "rapidly getting out of control" and was beginning to spread from drug users into the general population.
The global fund, launched last year by the United Nations, has already raised two billion dollars to combat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, which kill six million people a year in the world.