8,000 HIV patients at risk in Eastern Ukraine: UN envoy

VANCOUVER - Agence France-Presse

REUTERS photo

Some 8,000 people with HIV in war-torn eastern Ukraine face a critical shortage of medicine and their supply will run out in mid-August unless a blockade is lifted, a U.N. AIDS envoy has warned.

Speaking to AFP ahead of the International AIDS Society (IAS) conference, which opened Sunday, Michel Kazatchkine called on key nations to intervene as soon as possible.

“I am calling on the United States, Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia to do something,” said Kazatchkine, the U.N. Secretary General’s special envoy for AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

He said 8,000 patients are “caught in the political crossfire between the Ukrainian government and Russian-supported fighters” because they need both antiretroviral treatments and opioids, which are now blocked at border check points.

The looming crisis is centered in the mostly Russian-speaking Lugansk and Donetsk regions.

The area once housed 25 percent of Ukraine’s HIV-positive population, but thousands have already fled, said Kazatchkine.  Some 8,000 who are on antiretroviral treatment remain. About 1,000 of them are injection drug users whose treatments for addiction with opioid substitution therapy (OST) have been blocked since spring.

He said the treatments are already paid for and the aid group Doctors Without Borders has pledged to deliver and oversee treatment.    

But Ukraine will not allow the drugs to be shipped and argues the opioids require armed convoys, said Kazatchkine.  

Russia bans the use of opioids to help wean addicts off drug addiction.