Prisoners' health problems
Prosecutors Say 90% of Prisoners Are Ill
More than 90 percent of prisoners in Russian prisons and pretrial detention facilities have health problems, the Prosecutor General's Office said Wednesday.
Prison doctors registered more than 1.2 million cases of various illnesses last year, including serious diseases such as tuberculosis, hepatitis and HIV, said Marina Gridnyova, spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office, Interfax reported.
In July, the Federal Prison Service said illnesses affect 340,000 of the country's 846,000 inmates. It gave no data on people in pretrial detention.
Gridnyova blamed the situation on a lack of financing for prison health care, which she said was only allotted 24 percent of the required funding this year.
She added that prison hospitals lack personnel, and almost 60 percent of its medical equipment is obsolete.
This results in insufficient health care for inmates, which sometimes resulted in deaths, Gridnyova said, without elaborating.
She said prosecutors had filed a report with the Federal Prison Service but did not specify whether its officials faced any penalties.
(Published by The Moscow Times – August 12, 2010)