Russian response: Russia's leading HIV and AIDS experts lambasted the government yesterday for drastically underestimating the level of infected people and allocating a relative pittance to their treatment.
Mr Vadim Pokrovsky, of the Centre for the Prevention and Treatment of AIDS, said stigma and ignorance surrounding HIV kept the official number of sufferers down to 257,000, but as many as 1.5 million Russians could be carrying the disease.
That would mean 1 per cent of Russia's declining population was infected, but current state funding for AIDS treatment was only sufficient for 1,000 people, Mr Pokrovsky said.
"We are not sure that the government realises how great the problem is," he said. "In general, what our government does is not very serious. It's vital to take urgent measures, because 90 per cent of those infected are under 30 years of age," he said.
"Russia could lose an entire generation in the future, and that would do colossal economic damage to the country."
Three-quarters of Russia's HIV sufferers contracted the disease through drug-use, but infection rates from heterosexual sex are increasing, with a third of new victims now women of childbearing age, said Deputy Health Minister Mr Gennady Onishchenko.
He said victims faced fierce stigma and a high proportion of the 7,591 children officially diagnosed had been handed over to care by their parents. "One of the main problems in Russia is the stigmatisation of people who are HIV-positive, their rejection by society, the reaction of the man in the street that sees children turned away from schools and even from medical establishments," he said.
HIV and AIDS also blight Russia's impoverished and often unsanitary prisons and are making their mark on the armed forces, especially among conscripts, who mostly come from poor families.
Deputy Justice Minister Mr Yuri Kalinin said about 35,000 prisoners - 95 per cent of whom are drug addicts - have HIV, and that the infection rate was growing by as much as 20 per cent a year.
The UN has urged Russia to buy relatively cheap generic drugs from countries like Brazil, China and India. Medicine for one sufferer currently costs $6,000 a year in Russia, compared to less than $1,000 in India.