MOSCOW, April 23. /TASS/. Western countries, providing assistance to Africa in the fight against infections, are striving to realize their colonial ambitions, while Russia is interested in training highly qualified personnel, Anna Popova, head of the national sanitary regulator the Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing (Rospotrebnadzor) said.
According to Popova, Russia has been collaborating with its African partners for many years to prevent, study, and address infections. However, Russia’s approach to epidemic control differs from that of traditional donors.
"This is particularly evident in African countries. Western countries aim to make aid recipients even more reliant and fail to build their own capacity in the fight against epidemics. Assistance, in the interests of the donor, is restricted to creating basic laboratory infrastructure, testing their own kits, vaccines, and medicines. Western countries, as they did many centuries ago, seeking to fulfill their colonial ambitions, are exerting foreign influence in the field of infection prevention and control under the guise of aid," she said during the First Russian-African international exercises of rapid response teams to sanitary and epidemiological emergencies in Addis Ababa.
The head of the department noted that Russia is not engaged in "brainwashing" African states, but exports "biological" sovereignty. "Russia is interested in training highly qualified personnel who will raise the African continent, turning it into a new pole of development in accordance with the principle of 'African problems - African solutions,' new high-tech solutions," Popova explained.
She said that Russia not only supplies equipment, tests, and vaccines, but also teaches how to work with them and shares its experience. "We plan to further broaden the geography of our cooperation on the African continent," she concluded.