MOSCOW, July 1: Russia will receive $34.6 million from a leading AIDS fund to treat its growing number of cases of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, US Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson said on Thursday.

After a meeting with Russian counterpart Mikhail Zurabov, Thompson - also chairman of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria - said the two sides had also agreed a plan to slash the prices of imported AIDS medicines.

"The grant is set up to help provide anti-retroviral therapy to 5,000 people in the first year and up to 75,000 in the fifth year," Thompson told journalists. "It addresses therapy, not the causes."

Commonly transmitted via shared needles among drug users or through unprotected sex, HIV is rife in Russia's overcrowded prisons. There is no cure. It was unclear how the grant would be split between HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB), the contagious, air-borne disease that HIV-positive people are susceptible to because of their fragile immune systems. One in 10 minutes in Russia's jails have TB. -Reuters