2023-12-01 18:32:39
When the war in Ukraine began, Roman says he was afraid of many things. Not just from the Russian tanks at the border or the rockets that have regularly hit his hometown of Kiev since then. Also about the fact that he no longer gets his medication. Roman is HIV positive. To prevent the virus from spreading in his body, he has to take pills every day for the rest of his life. At the moment he is still getting his medication without any problems, although he fears that supply could become more difficult. “But I hope that doesn’t happen,” he says. Roman is 44 years old and he does not want his last name published. His relatives didn’t know he had HIV. “In Ukraine, if you find out that someone has HIV, you avoid them. There are a lot of prejudices against infected people here.”
While the HIV epidemic in Western Europe appears to have long been under control, Ukraine is the most affected country on the continent after Russia. Estimates put the number of people infected at up to 260,000, and the rate of those affected is around ten times higher than in Germany. The main driver of the spread of HIV in the post-Soviet countries at the end of the 1990s was intravenous drug use. Due to the high probability of transmission when sharing syringes, the availability of cheap drugs and a lack of education, the virus was able to spread rapidly in the successor states of the Soviet Union. After the turn of the millennium, the situation in Ukraine gradually improved. Prevention and drug substitution programs were introduced and greater involvement of civil society organizations was made possible. Now, in the shadow of war, the virus could spread again.
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