A.I.D.S. for Soviet babies

Press, 15 February 1989, Page 20

A.I.D.S. for Soviet babies

From the Moscow correspondent of ‘The Economist.’

If you fall ill in the Soviet Union, don’t drag yourself off to hospital. The discovery last month that 27 children had been infected with the A.I.D.S. virus in what might have seemed the most A.1.D.5.-immune part of the world — a provincial town In deepest Russia where few foreigners ever set foot — has thrown the spotlight on the Soviet Union’s, home-grown health problems. The country’s abominable health service is part of the problem, not part of the cure.

The children, all under the age of two, are thought to have caught the A.I.D.S. virus from contaminated syringes. Doctors in the town of Elista, about 150 miles south of Volgograd, are now examining 3000 other children who were treated in the same hospital last year. Hospital staff in Elista may face criminal proceedings. They have been accused in the Soviet press of negligence for failing to sterilise needles.

The Soviet Union is desperately short of even the most basic medical equipment. Blood

samples, as you correspondent can testify, are usually taken by a painful jab in the finger with a steel prong. The Soviet Union has devoted neither the resources to produce its own disposable syringes nor enough cash to buy them abroad (except, of course, for the Kremlin clinic). For years the medical profession has suffered from low status and been starved of cash. Hospital buildings are often insanitary. Bathrooms are generally dirtier than most public lavatories in the West, with cockroaches everywhere. The Health Minister, Mr Yevgeny Chazov, revealed last year that over half of the country’s hospitals and clinics have no hot water or mains drainage. A journalist recently reported her own experience of childbirth in a Soviet hospital. Nurses roared at her to “stop moaning” and refused even to bring a cup of tea after the birth: "Dinner time was long ago,” they said. For three days she lay in the same blood-stained sheets.

Midwives, the journalist noted sourly, have been “liquidated as a class.”

Doctors have been known to pull the copper wire out of telephone cables and use the insulation for babies’ throatfeeding tubes. Not surprisingly, infant mortality in the Soviet Union is two and a half times higher than in America or Britain.

In order to get quicker treatment, access to scarce drugs and more careful attention, Soviet citizens who can afford to pay bribes, from gifts of chocolates to hundreds of roubles. Many of them would be happy to make such fee-paying legal by allowing medical co-operatives to provide the services that state hospitals cannot.

For a time co-operatives were allowed to do so. But new rules ban them from providing treatment for cancer, drug-addiction and mental illness. They can no longer carry out operations or abortions, or manufacture medicines.

(Copyright — The Economist)