Russian TV host breaks taboo by announcing he is HIV-positive in live broadcast

It was a heartfelt admission of a kind that Russia has never seen before.

On Tuesday evening, Pavel Lobkov, a television host for the independent Dozhd channel, announced on air that he had been diagnosed in 2003 as being HIV-positive. It is the first time in recent memory that any Russian celebrity, major or minor, has publicly made such an announcement.

In an emotional monologue, Lobkov described how an unsympathetic doctor delivered the news at a government hospital.

The doctor “had a thick file crossed with a red marker - ‘HIV-positive’,” he recalled. “The doctor, with a face like a Soviet Buddha, told me: ‘You can no longer use the programme of voluntary medical insurance because you’ve been diagnosed with HIV. Your case will be transferred to the Moscow health-care committee. All the best. Goodbye’.”

Lobkov made the announcement on World Aids Day, a UN-backed initiative established in 1988 to raise awareness about HIV/Aids. Russia's Health Ministry on Wednesday announced that more than a million Russians will be diagnosed as HIV-positive by the end of the year, and a high-level Russian health official called the situation “an epidemic.”

As of last week, Russia's Federal Centre on Aids said that 986,657 Russians were HIV-positive and that 73,777 new cases had been diagnosed so far this year, an increase of 12 per cent from the same period last year.

More than half of Russians infected with HIV, the virus that causes Aids, contracted it through intravenous drug use. By contrast, men who have sex with men accounted for 68 per cent of new HIV cases in the United States in 2013, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.