Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warns that Russia is facing shortages of HIV drugs and testing kits

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said earlier today that some regions throughout Russia are experiencing interruptions in the supply of medicines used to treat patients infected with HIV, and shortages of the materials used to test people for the disease itself. "This endangers not only HIV-infected patients, but also healthy people," Medvedev said, speaking at a meeting of the government's commission on healthcare. 

“Every year, the number of HIV infections [in Russia] grows 10 percent. That's almost 10,000 people, according to the Ministry of Health's statistics,” Medvedev said.

The data Medvedev shared today does not correspond to reports about HIV infections from Russia's Federal Research and Methodological Center for the Prevention and Control of AIDS. That group's director, Russian Academy of Sciences scholar Vadim Pokrovsky, announced recently that Russia has 300 new HIV infections every week (more than 15,500 cases every year).

Pokrovsky says there were more than 933,000 recorded cases of HIV infection in Russia by May 2015. By the end of the year, he calculates that Russia will have a million people carrying HIV.