as small as a world and as large as alone, pulitzercenter: At one time Sasha Volgina was...

8:29pm August 3, 2013

At one time Sasha Volgina was an optimist.

The 36-year-old activist first learned she was HIV-positive in 2002. She initially believed, as most Russians did at the time, that anyone infected with HIV would be dead within six months. She eventually learned about anti-retroviral drug therapy. Those drugs keep her alive.

Sasha famously appeared on a Russian talk show in 2008; the main argument against her claim that Russia should make more drug addiction treatment options available was HIV may not even exist. “People don’t realize it’s an illness,“ Volgina says. “They think it’s a sin.”

All NGOs, especially those with connections to foreign countries, operate under an oppressive level of scrutiny; may risk being prosecuted under the new “foreign agent law" simply for receiving donations from abroad and engaging in anything broadly defined as “political activity.“

Her goals include bringing harm reduction practices to Russia—the distribution of condoms and clean syringes, opiate substitution treatment for heroin dependency. At one time it seemed like all of that was possible.

"We realized in something like 2006, that harm reduction programs were not really supported by the government,” Volgina says. “At first we thought it wasn’t so bad, but after that, year after year, it was worse and worse and worse.“

— Gregory Gilderman

Read more here about Russia’s growing AIDS epidemic and how government and societal indifference is leading to thousands of deaths.

#russia

#AIDS

#HIV

#health

#human rights

#anti-gay

#discrimination

#homophobia

#heterosexism

#lgbtq