13 June 2008
U.S. Companies, Aid Agencies Fighting HIV/AIDS in Russia
Initiatives aim to educate workers about behaviors to prevent infection
Washington -- In March, employees at the Pepsico plant in Kashira, Russia, participated in training sessions that encouraged them to find out their HIV status and to discuss behaviors and attitudes that might help stem the rise of AIDS in their community.
In Irkutsk, Orenburg and Ivanovo, programs funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development are training regional planners to evaluate HIV/AIDS intervention methods. As a result, these regions have boosted resources for prevention efforts.
On May 27, managers from multinational corporations working in Russia, including Chevron and Eli Lilly, met in Moscow to see what additional roles they could play in preventing the disease.
With the help of U.S. government money, a group called HEALTH@WORK has provided workplace HIV/AIDS prevention and nondiscrimination programs to firms employing more than 1 million Russians in the transportation, oil and gas, manufacturing and heavy industry sectors.
But health experts say much more is needed. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Russia has experienced one of the fastest-growing HIV/AIDS epidemics in the world. Just a decade after HIV was first identified in Russia, the Joint U.N. Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimates that more than 1 percent of adults aged 15-49 are HIV positive and that 43 percent of all newly reported cases are occurring in women.
In a report issued in March, the organization said that in 2006, the most recent period for which data are available, 66 percent of all new cases of HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia occurred in Russia.
HIV now has been detected in virtually all of the country’s 89 administrative territories, and serious epidemics have surfaced in 10 regions and major cities: the cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and the regions of Chelyabinsk, Irkutsk, Leningrad, Moscow, Orenburg, Samara, Sverdlovsk and the Khanty-Mansi autonomous district.
Health experts say the sharing of contaminated needles by drug users is responsible for about two-thirds of HIV transmission, and unprotected heterosexual intercourse is a growing factor in transmission.
Complicating the crisis is the emergence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). Patients with HIV/AIDS have weakened resistance, and nearly 60 percent of those who recently died from HIV/AIDS also had TB.
Eli Lilly is working with Russian partners to help with disease surveillance and training programs and to increase the supply of capreomycin and cycloserine, medications effective in treating MDR-TB.
In 2005, Eli Lilly helped establish a center of excellence in Tomsk, Russia, to train doctors, nurses and healthcare workers from all over the former Soviet Union in preventing, detecting and treating MDR-TB.
Chevron is a founding corporate sponsor of Transatlantic Partners Against AIDS (TPAA), an initiative aimed at bringing together the Russian and U.S. governments and the private sector to address the disease.
Under the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Russia has received some $53 million in program support during the last four years.
Most U.S.-supported work has been in two regions -- St. Petersburg and the Orenburg province. These efforts have included encouraging vulnerable groups to adopt safer behaviors, providing information about precautionary measures, urging early medical intervention, encouraging HIV-infected patients to make use of outpatient services, and enhancing competence and knowledge among midlevel medical personnel.
U.S. initiatives also are aimed at helping Russia develop a unified information system that will improve HIV/AIDS monitoring and evaluation, anti-viral treatment and palliative care.
