In the seventh month of pregnancy, she is active in the field with her NGO financed by the Global Fund: “We try to prevent the sick from interrupting treatment and the undiagnosed dying.” Ukraine is already among the countries with the highest levels of drug-resistant tuberculosis
Olya Klymenko is one of over 10 million Ukrainians fleeing the war. But she is among the few who have not stopped working. You are at the forefront of another front that is silently claiming victims. “We were gaining ground on that insidious enemy called Tbc, but everything changed in one day.” That day was February 24, when Russian troops invaded Ukraine. “In the first week I was in shock. Then I left Kiev with my team and moved west, in a safer place. A few days later the situation became dangerous there too, and we were forced to move again “tells via Zoom this displaced aged 35, in the seventh month of pregnancy.
“Today the explosions made me jump on the bed at 5 am. Instead of preparing me for the happy event, every day I have to think about where to live tomorrow. But he continues to work: I do not want all the efforts made to date to combat tuberculosis to be in vain»She clarifies that, as a survivor of the disease in 2016 she founded
TBPeopleUkraine, an NGO supported by the Global Fund, international organization engaged in the fight against HIV, TB and malaria.
Klymenko remembers that of consumption, as it was once called, one still dies. Other than a disease of the past and confined to poor countries. Of bacterial origin, despite being diagnosable and usually easily treatable, every day it kills over 4,100 people worldwide and infects 30,000, estimates the WHO. E rages not only in Asia and Africa but also in Eastern Europe, Ukraine in the first place, among the countries with the most worrying levels of drug-resistant tuberculosis (it is estimated that they account for about 30% of the 30,000 new cases per year).
“Tuberculosis has never been a priority for our politicians, funding at the national level is not comparable to that allocated for other diseases,” he observes.
To complicate the picture, the fact that for the first time in over a decade, sickness and deaths are on the rise because ofincrease in undiagnosed cases and untreated. A “Side effect” of Covid, with access to services and care in a swoop. So the tuberculosis was the infectious disease that killed the most in 2020 after Covidand spreads in a similar way.
Olya regrets that the bombs have come one step away from an important milestone. “Now that the situation was improving, the war broke out. For the first time, the government was allocating a portion of the national budget for the overall treatment of these patients, also offering social support. There is still a lot of stigma towards these sick people, they often lose their jobs, their homes. Parliament was preparing to change the old 1999 law, ”he says.
Now the goal is to try to mitigate the devastating impact of this conflict. “The our work has changed: before, we were mainly trying to raise awareness among institutions so that they could allocate more funds and improve the regulatory framework, now we are focused on supporting the existing one: providing medicines, preventing treatments from being interrupted, preserving surviving infrastructures, trying to prevent patient deaths undiagnosed, ”he explains.
It is not an easy job. “A week before the war, the Ukrainian Ministry of Health adopted an anti-crisis plan that provided for the discharge from hospitals of tuberculosis patients in the event of a conflict, for safety reasons.” They feared that health facilities could also become a target (well-founded fear: 64 attacks on health facilities verified by WHO in Ukraine since the start of the war). “Since then, patients have spread throughout the territory and it is difficult to have the situation under control and ensure treatment, even with medicines and materials that are in short supply. However, it was a wise decision: today it would have been more difficult to evacuate them and shelter them from violence ».
The difficult challenge is to be able to guarantee therapeutic continuity and support to patients under treatment: who interrupts, among other things, risks developing a form of TB that is resistant to drugs. In support, the Global Fund, also the main financier of Olya’s NGO, is about to release 15 million dollars in emergency funds for its partners in Ukraine and neighboring countries. The announcement was made last Thursday for World Tuberculosis Day, just when it was the first month of the war. A day with the spotlight on that should last all year, a month that you would like to archive forever.
March 26, 2022 (change March 26, 2022 | 10:33)
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