Fears of an AIDS epidemic in the former Soviet Union are not without foundation. According to official data released by Deputy Prime Minister Ms Valentina Matviyenko, more than 209,000 drug addicts were registered by appropriate Russian health centres in late 1999, while the figure for 1991 was 31,000. There are 143 drug addicts for every 100,000 people in the country.
The rate is higher in some regions; for example, 335 for Tyumen region in Siberia, 362 for Kemerovo region, 377 for Samara region on the Volga and 441 for Tomsk region.
AIDS incidence in Russia and other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States is strongly drugs related and the problems in the Siberian and Volga regions mentioned above are small compared with the rapid spread of the disease in the Russian Far East and the disastrous situation that exists in the town of Svetlogorsk in Belarus in which the figures for people found to be HIV positive have reached African proportions.
In the Primorye region, which includes the port city of Vladivostok, 1,159 people have tested positive for HIV in the first 10 months of this year, according to a spokeswoman for the region's AIDS prevention centre.
From 1989 to 1999, the centre registered only 145 cases, though that number probably understated the true level, since many AIDS sufferers in Russia hide the condition and refuse to register with authorities.
Russia has virtually no AIDS education or prevention programmes, treatment is hard to obtain and far too expensive for most patients, and people found to be HIV positive are often ostracised.
But all this pales in comparison to the town of Svetlogorsk, in south-eastern Belarus, which was founded 30 years ago by a decision of the Soviet planning authority. The intentions were good. A new town of between 60,000 and 70,000 people would be created with two major industries, a paper mill and a chemical plant, as its economic base.
The name Svetlogorsk (Bright Mountain) itself was a hopeful one and portrayed the optimism of planners who were confident that their system would triumph.
At the time of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 Svetlogorsk avoided the worst of the fallout because of the direction in which the wind was blowing. After that its luck ran out.
One major omission from the planners' scheme was the provision of entertainment for young people. Boredom set in. In the mid-1990s two youngsters returned to Svetlogorsk from college in St Petersburg. They brought with them the drug culture which had grown up in Russia's former capital. Their expertise included the ability to grow poppies in the hot, short summers of Belarus, and the technique to turn their crop into opium.
The result has been a catastrophe of proportions unknown elsewhere in Europe. According to Dr Svyatoslav Samoshkin, who runs Svetlogorsk's anti-AIDS programme, 1,318 young people are registered at his clinic as HIV positive. Usually the ratio of unregistered to registered in this category is about 10 to one, but Dr Samoshkin feels so much work has been done in his town that there are just three times as many unregistered HIV positive young people.
Even if this estimate is correct, the figure is still astounding: almost 4,000 HIV-positive young people in a population of a little more than 70,000 presents an appalling scenario. And things could get worse.
