Kyiv
Ukraine
All-Ukrainian Union of PLWH Kyiv AIDS Memorial Quilt since 1 January 2010
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Methadone Clinics Help Ukraine Succeed Where Russia Fails on HIV
Ukraine is checking the spread of HIV for the first time in more than a decade by handing out methadone and clean needles to drug users, measures long embraced in the U.S. yet still opposed in neighboring Russia.
More than 8,300 people were receiving substitution therapy to keep them off injected drugs as of Dec. 1, more than all the other nations of the former Soviet Union combined, according to the International HIV/AIDS Alliance in Ukraine, which supports many of the nation’s clinics with money from the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
The approach is working. New HIV infections, which had been rising since 1999, fell in 2012 to 20,743 from 21,777 in 2011, according to the nation’s health ministry. In Russia, where the government bans opioid substitutes such as methadone and refuses to fund clean-needle programs, new infections jumped 13 percent to 70,453 in 2012.
People walk past quilts made by HIV positive people to commemorate AIDS victims, at Mikhaylovskaya Square in Kiev on May 13, 2011.
Photo (c) Genya Savilov BloombergBusinessweek


13 May 2011
Simeon Bennett, Kyiv