MOSCOW, November 1. /TASS/.Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) morbidity is decreasing in Russia, Alexey Mazus, chief visiting HIV specialist of the Russian health ministry, said on Tuesday.

"Today, we are observing an optimistic scenario of the implementation of the state anti-HIV strategy up to the year 2030, with actual incidence rates going down faster than scheduled," he said.

Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the HIV epidemiology and prevention department of the Central Research Institute of Epidemiology, said earlier that some one percent of Russians, or up to 1.5 million people, are HIV-positive. Mazus, however, said that these data are only estimates as they cannot be verified. So, in his words, they cannot be taken as indicators of the actual situation.

According to the health ministry expert, there were 851,754 HIV-infected people in Russia in 2021, with 58,788 of them being first diagnosed with HIV in 2021.