| The population groups exposed to a greatest risk
of HIV infection are: injecting drug users, commercial sex workers and
their clients, men having sex with men, including bisexuals, sex partners
of drug users, jail inmates, military servants and law-enforcement agencies’
officers, long-distance trailer drivers, workers who stay out of home for
a long time to do jobs, and children whose parents belong to these risk
groups. These groups are not only at a greater risk of being infected but
also carries HIV to the rest of the country’s population.
In Russia, like in other countries, there are only
fragmentary data available on the size of the main risk groups. Of the
communities mentioned above, some information has been collected only about
IDUs. The MSM community is self organizing, establishing various kinds
of clubs, associations, etc. There are only casual Interior Ministry police
officers’ estimates of the CSW, the group remaines statistically unobserved.
Less latent groups, for example, military servicemen, however strange it
might be, has been studied little in terms of the HIV epidemic.
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