Figure of the day: There are twice as many HIV-infected people in the country as according to statistics

29 ноября 2022, 13:42
Recently, the annual increase in Russian citizens living with HIV is at least 30 thousand people.

Ivan Zubov

In early November, the online publication To be precise wrote that officials constantly give different numbers when they talk about the number of people with HIV in Russia. Meanwhile, according to the publication, at least 400,000 Russians are living with HIV without an official diagnosis.

Recall that according to the head of the AIDS Department of the Central Research Institute of Epidemiology of Rospotrebnadzor Vadim Pokrovsky, up to 1.5 million Russian citizens are infected with HIV - this is 1% of the population. According to his forecasts, from 2020 to 2030 the number of new cases of infection with the virus will be another 660 thousand.

Journalists of the publication comment on these data in the following way:

  1. According to official data, by the end of 2021, 1.1 million Russians have been diagnosed with HIV. If we correctly understood Pokrovsky's words, then about 400 thousand more people are people who live with HIV, but do not have an official diagnosis (and the state knows about it).
  2. According to our estimates for 2021, about half of all people with HIV were on therapy. However, we are talking about officially registered patients. If we assume that 1.5 million Russians are infected, then it turns out that only one in three receives treatment.
  3. In 14 regions of Russia, mainly in Siberia and the Urals, one can speak of a generalized HIV epidemic, which means that HIV has gone beyond vulnerable groups and is taking root in the general population. An epidemic is considered generalized if the prevalence of HIV infection among pregnant women is consistently above 1%.
  4. To stop the epidemic, it is necessary that 90% of people with HIV (that is, 1.3 million Russians) receive treatment. Ideally, an all-in-one pill regimen where the patient does not need to follow a complicated drug schedule (currently only 5.5% of people with HIV receive it)

A detailed text about this problem appeared the other day in Kommersant. There, with reference to the data of the analyst Ksenia Babikhina, the following terrifying figures are given:

“In fact, for five years we have seen a figure of plus or minus 850,000 people with HIV. It is noteworthy that in recent years, 60-80 thousand cases are registered per year (again, depending on the source), and about 30 thousand people die with HIV per year.

In summary: the annual increase in new people living with HIV should be at least 30,000 and at a maximum of 50-60,000 people. That is, even according to the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation, there should be about 1.0–1.1 million people living with HIV, but not 850 thousand, and the number of people with HIV should increase annually due to the detected cases”.

This means that the state has somehow "lost" at least 300,000 people with HIV, and about 400,000 more HIV-positive Russian citizens do not know anything about their diagnosis.

At the same time, no one, except researchers and employees of NGOs, seems to care about such a spread. In response to requests from journalists to clarify such discrepancies, the Ministry of Health has for several years referred to Article 9 of the law "On Official Statistical Accounting and the System of State Statistics in the Russian Federation", according to which primary statistical data are confidential information.

In general, the number of people with HIV in Russia seems to be another state secret, experts conclude.

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