Russia's Miss Positive wants HIV honesty not shame

When Svetlana Izambayeva started to speak candidly about being HIV positive, people froze and backed away if she went to shake hands.

Some were scared to drink from the same glass as her, others worried what would happen if she scratched them. Everyone wanted to know why she wasn't keeping something so dreadful a secret.

"For Russians HIV is fear, it's death. People cannot understand why I am open about it," said Ms Izambayeva, who on World AIDS Day yesterday was crowned the winner of Russia's first Miss Positive beauty contest.

Ms Izambayeva was diagnosed with HIV in 2002 after a seaside love affair. She spent her March 8 holiday - normally a big day for women in Russia when male family and friends shower them with flowers and attention - crying in her bedroom.

"I wanted to die," she told Reuters in an interview. "The doctors said I'd live for eight years. But they behaved like I was already a corpse."

Now aged 24, confident and stylishly dressed, she is determined to show she has nothing to hide.

"People see I'm healthy, beautiful, cheerful. They see that I'm always smiling and all their stereotypes just completely fall apart," said Ms Izambayeva, who comes from the Chuvash Republic, a region of Russia some 12 hours train ride east of Moscow. She takes no special medication, apart from lots of vitamins. She swims and runs and avoids stress.

Unlike in Western Europe and North America where AIDS was initially stigmatised as a "gay disease", in Russia people mainly associate it with drug addicts and prostitutes.

"The attitude in Russia is that 'normal' people don't get it," said Ms Izambayeva, who works as a hairdresser.

"I've asked children at schools what people with HIV are like and they say, 'Er... well they're those scary, homeless people who lie around on the streets'. And you can imagine what adults are saying if children talk like that."

Although the number of Russians with HIV is a fraction of what it is in sub-Saharan Africa, the rate at which it is spreading is one of the fastest in the world. The proportion of Russians with HIV has nearly doubled to 231 per 100,000 from 121 per 100,000 in 2001.

And more and more it is the so-called "normal" people who are at risk. In Moscow in 2000, drug use caused over 80 per cent of infections and heterosexual sex just 10 per cent. By 2004 the proportions were nearly half and half.

The state does not always help, say AIDS workers who were horrified by a Moscow government-sponsored campaign with the message: "There's no such thing as safe sex".