Russia Sees an AIDS 'Explosion'

[dArKeR]

Government Slow to React To Five Years of Warnings

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service

IRKUTSK, Russia -- Andrei Artyomenko can pinpoint the day he believes he became infected. He was 21 years old, a product of a broken family, a school dropout, a junkie living in this Siberian city. By his own account, he looked awful, wearing dirty clothes and weighing just 128 pounds. His mother wouldn't let him come home because he kept stealing from her to pay for his habit.

One day he and a friend retreated into the darkened stairwell of a nine-story apartment building where no one would bother them. "He had just one syringe," Artyomenko recalled. "He warned me. He said, 'I'm not sure, but I think I got bombed,' " meaning infected. But the warning went unheeded.

"All I could think about was the needle," Artyomenko said. "I had to have it."

That spring of 1999 would introduce HIV not only into his own veins but into the Russian national bloodstream as well. It was the spring of "the explosion," as it is called here, the spring this remote Siberian outpost suddenly was no longer so cut off from the rest of the world.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37342-2004Jun12.html

I'd like to ask Peter Baker how many times he's traveled to Asia/Eastern Europe? He like almost every report I see tend to blame AIDS on drug users then second it to sexual activity. Well, anyone who has actually visited these areas before they published a report might notice some other reasons/habits of culture as I witnessed. I would estimate 99.99% of the population; share food from mouth to mouth within a family and friends. I've seen people rip off a piece of chicken with their mouth and pass the other piece off; 100% share salivated drinks which they pass around; 100% have eaten in markets with cooks who have open sores and/or cut fingers; 100% have eaten in markets with cooks who have dropped sweat onto the food; 100% have eaten in markets that use cold water and/or little to no soaps to wash the dishes;

Lastly the most scarey for me, the Barber Shop. Oh Willy! Not only has this happened to me 50 times, I've seen it happen another 500 times while waiting. NO barber utensils are EVER CLEANED. (I guess no American Whore Reporter has stayed long enough in these countries to get a haircut?) This first time I got nicked by the straight-edge razor in Thailand and then she just kept working on as if nothing happened and then threw the razor on the counter for the next customer. Then I realized that the last customers' blood was still on the razor too! Every country I've been to in Asia is the same.

After my first trips to Asia, 14 years ago, then returned back home to CA, I was in the community health center. One that specialized in Aids, in Santa Clara. I was there to give them very important information to help stop the spread of AIDS in the world, to help humanity! I got an appointed with a head Administrator and told him the above story and especially the razor blades. I told him 'you've got to the international AIDS groups to tell their foreign counter parts to change some barber practices. Someones got to tell them they have to dip the razors in that solution that my barber does in Sunnyvale.' The adminstrators immediate response was, 'there's nothing I can do about that.' and he had to get back to something. And I left, and millioin people died.