Moscow calls new UN data on Russian HIV infection rates 'propaganda'
Russia’s Health Ministry has denied the accuracy of new data from the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) that lists Russia among the five countries in the world with the highest HIV infection rates.
According to UNAIDS and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, Russia accounted for 3.9 percent of the 1.5 million new HIV infections in the world in 2021. The only countries found to have higher rates were South Africa (14 percent of all new infections), Mozambique (6.5 percent), Nigeria (4.9 percent), and India (4.2 percent).
The Russian Health Ministry called the data “another propaganda provocation directed against our country.” The agency accused data collectors of “arbitrarily and tendentiously interpreting figures from various sources, accumulating information about the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic for different observation years.”
“Despite the obvious successes of Russian medicine, attempts to manipulate statistical data regarding the situation with AIDS infections in our country are becoming more and more frequent,” read the ministry’s press release.
