A mobile medical centre for AIDS treatment and prevention in Ekaterinburg. (c) Pavel Lisitsyn / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.I’m standing on the square in front of Ekaterinburg’s Megapolis shopping centre. A mobile testing unit is due to turn up any minute now, but it’s held up. I ask the centre’s security guard, who’s wrapped up from head to toe, where the van usually stops, and he motions towards the space between the shopping centre and the metro station. It’s 26 degrees below zero and I have to nip into a café every five minutes to warm up and phone the city’s AIDS centre, where they assure me that the minibus will be there any moment.
Andrei Guselnikov, the journalist at the Ura.ru news agency who first broke the news of Ekaterinburg’s HIV epidemic, tells me that the minibuses used by the AIDS centre were not designed for this type of work: they are too cold and cramped and they are always breaking down. I’m worried that it might have broken down again.
A month ago the staff at the AIDS centre, in an effort to publicise their lack of funding, announced that Ekaterinburg was in the grip of an epidemic: 26,693 people were registered as HIV positive – one in 50 of the city’s 1.4m residents. The Sverdlovsk region, of which Ekaterinburg is the capital, has the highest incidence of HIV in Russia: 1,182 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
