The experience of Swiss specialists in prophylactics of HIV and drug addiction can become useful in Bashkortostan

“The experience of Swiss specialists in prophylactics of HIV and drug addiction can become useful in Bashkortostan” – the senior doctor of the Republican center for prophylactics and struggle with AIDS and infectious diseases Rafael Yapparov says – “But only taking the realities of our everyday life into account. He stated about that at the press-conference re prophylactics of socially significant diseases with participation of specialists from the Swiss medical society “Infect Team Schweiz Russland” from the town of Saint-Galen (Switzerland).

“For the last 20 years the number of drug addicts in Switzerland is going down but at that the situation with HIV remains rather difficult, so we conduct various prophylactic actions among local population in two directions at once; separately on HIV and separately on drug addiction. In our opinion this approach is rather efficient” – the head of the Swiss delegation, Professor Petro Vernazza says – “For example, any drug addict may come and change his used syringe for a new one absolutely freely because it is important for us to avoid the infection of another man or woman. From the other side thereby we teach the society to be tolerant towards drug addicts”.

M-r Vernazza believes that this variant of prophylactics can be applied in Bashkortostan but at the same time admits that “Russian society isn’t yet ready for it”.

Besides, the Swiss Professor suggests that the medical program of electronic management for people with HIV should be introduced in Bashkortostan. The program was designed in Austria ten years ago. Now it is considered the best in Europe for monitoring of HIV-infected people and people, suffering from chronic virus hepatitis B and C and for efficient highly active anti-virus therapy.

On May 20, 2011, 11332 HIV-infected people have been revealed in Bashkortostan, 8756 people are registered officially and people at the age between 21 and 40 make up 84%. Since the beginning of this year about 700 newly revealed HIV-carriers have been registered in the Republic.