Newsletter

UNFPA
United Nations Population Fund

The UN Fund for Population Activities

The latest stage in the project "Adolescent Sexuality and Birth Control/Reproductive Health/Sex Education among Young Adults," which is being carried out by the Russian Family Planning Association (RFPA), consisted of seminars in a number of Russian regions in April-May. In some of the regions, notably those of Ivanovo, St. Petersburg, Krasnodar, Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk and Moscow – training sessions organized by the RFPA and Youth Centres which received instruction during the preceding year took place.

They provided training for instructors for further work with youth activists – young men and ladies aged 15–17, to distribute information on the "young person to young person" basis. The future instructors were informed about the problems associated with sex education for young people in Russia, about sexually-transmitted diseases, and contraception. The participants got tips on providing consultations on healthy life style education, and were introduced to the forms and methods of working with adolescents, on planning and on the organization of project-related events.

The participants had a very good impression of the training sessions. They commented on the high professionalism of the trainers, the large amount of knowledge and skills they have recieved and the relevance of the information provided.

Reproductive Health in Russia
In this edition the newsletter "UN in Russia" begins regular publication of facts and figures
on reproductive health in Russia

Rate of STDs in Russia

• The growth in STDs, especially among young people, has assumed catastrophic proportions since the early 1990s.

• STDs among children between 1990 and 1997 increased 70 times.

• In 1996 alone, 388,000 people contracted syphilis, and its level was 265 per 100,000, 48 times higher than in 1990.

• In 1997, a total of 28,000 children and adolescents, of whom more than 10 percent were below the age of 14, contracted syphilis. And, in 1997, 181.4 young men aged 15-17 per every 100,000 had the disease.

• STDs among young men aged 15–17 attained 190 per 100,000 in 1997 and, among young women, 175.9.

• Up to 16 percent of all children and young adults up to the age of 19 had venereal diseases.

• Most of the sexually-transmitted diseases (44.5 percent) were contracted by persons aged 20-29, the best fertile age period.

AIDS/HIV

• The relatively stable situation with the spread of HIV infection in Russia of late began to deteriorate sharply since 1996.

• In 1995, only 195 cases of HIV-infection were registered, soaring to 1,535 in 1996 and about 2,000 in the first five months of 1997 alone. 40 percent of HIV- infected are women.

• According to estimates, by the year 2000 approximately 1 million people in the world will be HIV-infected.

UNFPA
United Nations Population Fund

Family Planning/Reproductive Health Course in the Netherlands

Two Russians – Liudmila Pospelova, Chief Specialist at the Department for Maternal and Child Health at the Russian Ministry of Health, and Valery Shelest, Chief Doctor at the Kaliningrad Regional Centre for Family Planning and Reproduc-tion – spent three weeks on an internship in the Netherlands. Between April 26 and May 15, they attended courses on specialist instruction in family planning, sex education and reproductive health organized by the UNFPA.

The programme of courses consisted of theoretical and practical training in contemporary methods of family planning, organizing family planning and reproductive health services, and enhancing knowledge of public information and education. The programme included lectures, training in groups, the presentation of projects on family planning and sex education programmes, the demonstration of slides, videos and brochures. The participants wanted to learn more about teaching methodology, which was characterised by active participation in lectures, studies, work on thematic problems, and the actuality and importance of discussions.

Reproductive Health Data on the Internet

The Internet is an extencive source of information for any kind of activity, provided either for general public or experts, thereby implementing the democratic principle of access to information. These are the goals of COMPASS, an Internet interactive system for presentation, modelling and analysis being designed by the Sector for Geoinformational Technolo-gies and Systems of the Institute for the Problems of Information Transmission of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The UNFPA has taken advantage of the capability of the system to present reproductive health data of each of Russia’s regions in its opening Internet web-site.

A group led by Valery Gitis, head of the Sector for Geoinfor-mational Technologies and Systems, has designed a new type of software for the presentation and comprehensive analysis of the territorial and time attributes of information from the geographic objects. The COMPASS system is an administrative territorial map of Russia, coloured in accordance with given parameters. The user can obtain the required information in the text or chart form. In addition, the system is able to analyze a unit by a whole range of characteristics: building maps of similarities between all objects of the map with selected standards by arbitrary selection; classifying units by similarity with two groups of standard units.

UNFPA approached the State Statistics Committee and Russian Ministry of Health to obtain statistical data such as STDs rates, maternal mortality and the like. UNFPA hopes that the system will be of interest to the appropriate governmental institutions, international organizations and non-governmental organizations.

To test the system go to: http://host64.iitp.ru/undp

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