Window on Eurasia

Russia Facing a Hepatitis B Epidemic

Paul Goble

Vienna, June 23, 2006 – Russian epidemiologists warned this week that the population of their country is on the brink of an epidemic of hepatitis
B, a disease that already affects more than seven million people and
one that is likely to cause the premature deaths of as many as two percent
of that group.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Academician Vadim Pokrovskiy, the
health ministry’s top epidemiologist, pointed out that there were 7.4
million Russians infected with hepatitis B in 2002, the last year for
which figures have been published, but that ther are now far more
[http://www.rustrana.ru/print.php?nid=24530].

A vaccine against this disease has been available for a long time,
Pokrovskiy said, but few Russians have received it to date. And while
80 to 90 percent of those who contract it will recover on their own, some
ten to 20 percent will come down with the chronic and incurable form
of that disease – and ten to 20 percent of those will die as a
result.

Pokrovskiy’s colleage, Vasiliy Isakov, a scholar at the Russian
Academy of Medical Sciences, argued that current methods of treating
the disease in Russia are relatively ineffective and urged that Russian
government not only acknowledge the problem, something it has not done,
but devote far more resources to their care.

Today, he added, “someone who suffers from chronic hepatitis B is not
even officially registered.” And as a result, this disease will
continue to spread because those infected either do not know that they
have it and thus continue to spread the disease or find that many
doctors around the country do not know what to do to help them.

That is all the more serious, Pokrovskiy added, because hepititis B
belongs to the same category of diseases as hepatitis C and HIV/AIDS
and the spread of one can have the effect of contributing to the spread of
others. And thus the failure of the authorities to focus on this
disease may undermine their efforts to combat more high-profile ones.

But there is another dimension to this problem that neither Pokrovskiy
nor Isakov pointed to, at least in their remarks as covered in the
media, and it is this: If Moscow is going to address the demographic
problems of the Russian population, it will have to adopt a far more
comprehensive approach than it has up to now.