The epidemic of HIV and AIDS, the largest in Eastern…

““The epidemic of HIV and AIDS, the largest in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, is even more worrisome. Registered cases in 2012 numbered more than seven hundred thousand, up from fewer than half a million as recently as 2008, but no such figure can be trusted in a country that blamed the Pentagon for AIDS during the Cold War. Experts say the real rate is at least double the official number—and growing, thanks largely to the use of heroin, which is also rapidly spreading. Although AIDS is the third leading cause of premature death—compared to the twenty-third in the United States—Moscow no longer accepts funding from the United Nations UNAIDS program or other international organizations because it sees itself as a donor country, not a recipient of help. However, the government doesn’t finance programs that had been until recently supported by foreign agencies.10 Insufficient funding for known cases of AIDS virtually guarantees that patients receive generally inferior treatment, and poor people get by far the worst from the badly fraying social services and healthcare system. The United Nations places Russia seventy-first in the world in human development, after Albania and just above Macedonia. (Norway is first; the United States thirteenth.)””

— Gregory Feifer