Almost a week ago the BBC carried this story concerning the latest outbreak of maternal/infant HIV, this time in Namangan, in the Ferghana Valley of eastern Uzbekistan.
The Uzbek cases were discovered in October, and have reportedly been referred to prosecutors.
But they have not been reported in the local media, which is tightly controlled by the government.
The officials who spoke to the BBC’s Uzbek service were only prepared to comment on condition of anonymity.
Not So Fast, says the Uzbek government.
“Everything is fine in this hospital. There are not 43 HIV positive children and the source of this information in the press is unclear to us,” the official added.
Previous cases include last March’s outbreak in Osh, Kyrgyzstan and the outbreak in Shymkent, Kazakhstan. I can speak from some experience in that case, as I was living in Sayram at the time, a small city 8 km from Shymkent, and many of the infected women and babies in Kazakhstan were one-time residents of Sayram. I say “one-time residents” because after the disclosure of their illness by local authorities, they were shunned and cut off from their families. Some women learned their children were HIV positive only after being arrested by local police for being prostitutes and drug-users, the only evidence brought against them being their sick children.
I’m not ready to suggest a correlation, but it is odd that Uzbeks seem to be suffering from these outbreaks disproportionately. Many of the victims in the South Kazakhstan outbreak were ethnic Uzbeks, as I assume were those in Namangan, and as Uzbeks make up a large percentage of the inhabitants of the city of Osh, I assume the afflicted women and children there were likewise Uzbeks.
Even as the trial against the doctors and nurses ‘at fault’ was unraveling, I remember hearing rumors that the whole tragedy was a political setup.
It’s no secret that the health catastrophe fomented change at the highest level of the region. Conspiracy Theories are the most dangerous lies because they feed the fatalism and defeatism already too common in the region, but I’m inclined to lend some credence to those surrounding the HIV scandals. Particular the idea that the scandal wasn’t out of the ordinary, just distinctive in scale and useful as a tool to oust the incumbent ‘rulers’ of South Kazakhstan. With the increased rate of these outbreaks, it becomes more and more clear that the lack of sanitary conditions, the horrible financial state of the state-run health system, combined with the relatively low level of health education among the populace and those doctors not employed in modern, private facilities all work in concert to make these health travesties possible.
And what of the explanation that medical corruption plays into this? The idea that blood is bought and sold goes a long way to explaining this, but what isn’t clear is where all the HIV-infected blood is coming from. The governments of the Central Asian republics are not treating HIV as the epidemic it is quickly becoming there, claiming low numbers of infected. However, the drug trade and increasing prostitution can’t be helping matters, especially considering the high percentage of Central Asian men that lose their virginity having unprotected sex with prostitutes. I heard from many men there, not to mention circumspect wives, that this practice is common, and quietly accepted.
This post was written by...
Michael Hancock-Parmer – author of 158 posts on Registan.net.
Michael earned an MA in Central Eurasian Studies in 2011 and remains a student at Indiana University pursuing a dual PhD in Russian History and Central Eurasian Studies. He served 6 months in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan in 2005. After the events in Andijan and the subsequent closure of the program, he served 2 years in southern Kazakhstan, returning to the Midwest in 2007. His general area of interest is on post-Timur Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, centered on the Syr Darya river valley.
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Michael, just an aesthetic tip, I advise strongly against ending one sentence with “men that lose their virginity having unprotected sex with prostitutes.” and beginning the next one with “I can only speak from my own experience”
I’m just picking on you though, these are good observations.