Starting in January 2019, public schools in Tajikistan’s three largest cities began testing students for HIV. According to Dilshod Saiburkhonov, deputy director of the Republican Center for the Prevention and Control of AIDS, the government campaign to test approximately 120,000 students in Dushanbe, Tursunzoda, and Kulob was launched in accordance with the government’s protocol request adopted in April 2018.
The testing campaign in public schools is part of a larger effort to contain the spread of HIV in Tajikistan. According to the United Nations Joint Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in 2016, there were approximately 14,000 individuals living with HIV in Tajikistan, even though official government statistics place that figure significantly lower. UNAIDS reported at the time that new cases of HIV infection had increased 23 percent since 2010. Recognizing the problem, in 2019 Tajik President Emomali Rahmon signed new amendments adopted by the parliament to the Criminal Code to strengthen legal repercussions for doctors, beauty salons, hairdressers, and other service providers implicated in the spread of HIV and other diseases.
Nonetheless, a few years earlier, the government made it compulsory to submit a medical certificate before getting married. In 2018 alone, approximately 134,000 people received medical checkups before marriage, and 58 of them were identified as HIV-positive. As a result, they were denied a marriage certificate. Previously, Saodatbibi Sirodzheva, head of Civil Registry Offices of the Ministry of Justice of Tajikistan, said that she would discourage the marriage of a couple when one partner tests positive for HIV because “families must be healthy.”
Her words echo the wider stigma attached to HIV-positive people in Tajikistan. In addition to the problems associated with the condition itself, HIV-positive individuals face acute challenges in everyday life. For example, they have to hide their status in order to maintain a job and avoid mistreatment by neighbors and even relatives. As a result, the situation has only grown worse. The groups most affected by the virus — sex workers, men who have sex with men, transgender persons, and intravenous drug users — are discouraged by fear of stigma from testing for HIV and other diseases and ultimately from receiving treatment. On top of that, they may even face legal consequences resulting from the criminalization of HIV transmission, sex work, and drug use.
Even though the number of HIV-positive individuals continues to increase, the subject of sexually transmitted diseases remains one of the numerous taboo topics in many Tajik families. At the same time, schools lack even basic sex education. Read more via the Diplomat