Sex Partners
of Drug Users
According to some authors, 86% of IDUs were sexually
active in St. Petersburg, and 88% - in Tver; 51% of IDUs had one permanent
sex partner, 36% - had more than one partner, and 63% - had a sex partner
who was not an IDU.
Getting a sex partner involved in the use of drugs
is a typical phenomenon. In Moscow, 76% of female IDUs said that they had
got involved in the use of drugs by their sex partners. The probability
of being involved is higher, if a drug abuser is a man, in about 80% of
such cases female partners become drug abusers.
During previous five years a drug user had 41 sex
partners who were also IDUs, and 119 sex partners who were not IDU, i.e,
on average, 24 partners, who were not IDUs per year. The likelihood of
having an IDU sex partner for sexually active school children and college
students is very high. The size of the group of IDU sex partners is very
hard to estimate, and in the opinion of V. Pokrovsky, their number might
be three to four times as high as the number of IDUs, or 9-14 million.
The use of condoms is most likely not typical of
IDUs. Between 13% and 17% of them always or regularly use condoms in Ekaterinburg,
Nizhni Novgorod and Togliatti, and 40% - in Tver.
Bisexuals
48% of men interviewed by A. Kinsey admitted that
during their sex life they had had at least one homosexual contact, and
18% - had had an approximately equal number of homo- and heterosexual contacts,
at least, over three years. According to various research findings, the
number of bisexuals among the MSM population is 22%, 24% and 17%. The available
data on Russia show that 72% of MSMs had female partners, 59% - never used
condoms in their sex contacts with men, and 54% - with women, definiely
most MSMs in Russia are bisexuals and, thus, act as a «bridge» for passing
on HIV infection from the MSM group to the heterosexual population.
Clients of
Commercial Sex Female Workers
Most of the CSWs’ clients have a permanent sex partner
but still seek to have a lot of sex contacts. Some 14% of men admitted
that they constantly use the services of prostitutes, 42.9% - said that
they had used their services many times, and 42.9% - one or several times;
according to other data, 64% of men use the services of prostitutes from
time to time, and 60% of them never use condoms. The clients are not inclined
to use condoms and prefer to pay more for sex without a condom. According
to some data, 45% of CSWs said that their clients are ready to pay a higher
price for sex without a condom.
The estimates of CSWs’ «workload» vary substantially:
a CSW in Saratov has seven clients a day, in Irkutsk - 100 clients a month,
and in Moscow - between 3 and 40 clients, an average of nine clients a
week, or 295 clients a year. The creator of Internet sex portal believes
that in Moscow the clients of prostitutes are actually not more than 300,000
men, some of them use their services repeatedly within a month. According
to V. Pokrovsky, about 2% of adult men are CSWs’ clients, thus the number
of CSWs’ clients may be as big as 1.3 million. There are virtually no data
on the number of women who are CSWs’ clients, and, in all probability,
this group has been so far small in number in Russia.
Prison Populations
There were about one million jail inmates in Russia
in 2002. Registered HIV incidence among the prison populations in Russia
in 2000-2002 was between 1% and 2%. A total of 38,000 HIF-infected have
been detected among them during the period of observation. Most of the
HIV-infected jail inmates are IDUs.
Others
Long-distance trailer drivers are at great risk for
HIV because they often use the services of CSWs. Workers who stay out of
home for a long time to do jobs are also CSWs’ clients and there may be
both IDUs and MSMs among them. Servicemen and law-enforcement agencies’
officers are also likely to be among the clients of CSWs, IDUs and MSMs.
As can be seen from these examples, among other groups at risk are male
communities who are out of contact with women for a long while for one
reason or another.
Children of Parents
From Among Risk Groups
Nearly 5,000 children had been born by HIV-positive
mothers in Russia by 2003, and about 19% of the children are HIV-infected
(as estimated by Ye. Sokolova, the probability of vertical transmission
in Russia is 19%). Therefore, the number of such children will be growing
with each passing year.
The project revealed, that there a few estimates
of the size of risk groups, and the range of estimates is too large. We
see two possible explanations: doubtful and unconventional operational
definitions of the risk groups, and the relative novelty of the phenomena
for our country. For research purposes, FRMC AIDS’s data base is likely
to be a more reliable source to estimate not only HIV prevalence but also
the size of the risk groups.
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