In a street in Bucharest, drug addicts crowd around an ambulance to collect rare syringes. While all eyes are on Covid-19, the fight against HIV is stalling and AIDS is advancing in disguise in Eastern Europe.
Alina Schiau, from the Romanian AIDS Association (ARAS), travels three times a week in sensitive areas of the capital to come to the aid of vulnerable people and provide them with sterile equipment in order to avoid a risk of contamination. But stocks are dwindling and rounds are getting shorter. For lack of public funds while all efforts are focused on the coronavirus, the ambulance may have to remain in the garage as early as November, she laments.
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“What costs less? Buy a syringe or treat a patient all his life? ” indignantly his colleague Ada Luca, angry at the inaction of the government. Even before the health crisis, the former communist bloc was among the most affected regions: in 2019, 76% of AIDS cases diagnosed on the Old Continent were in its eastern part, according to the European Center for Prevention and of disease control (ECDC). And the Covid-19 only made the situation worse.
Sudden slowdown in screening
“In addition to the stigmatization still suffered by people living with HIV in many countries, the pandemic has added additional challenges,” Davron Mukhamadiev, European coordinator of the Red Cross (IFRC), told AFP.
Hospitals closed to non-covid patients, confinement, travel restrictions: “Access to screening and diagnostic services has been restricted,” he said.
According to UNAIDS, 140,000 new HIV infections were counted in Eastern Europe and Central Asia in 2020, against 170,000 in 2019. Far from indicating a change in trend, this drop reflects a “sudden slowdown” Of screening, underlines the UN agency.
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Country of 19 million inhabitants, Romania, which has around 17,000 HIV-positive patients, has seen the number of tests drop by a third last year. Ditto in neighboring Bulgaria: “The regional health centers have been overwhelmed by screening for the coronavirus and have hardly done any anti-HIV tests”, deplores Alexander Milanov, of the National Patients’ Organization.
By disrupting logistics chains, the pandemic has also made it difficult for patients to access medicines, underlines Mukhamadiev. Another challenge for Romanians living with HIV, while hospitals regularly find themselves out of treatment, in this country with the lowest budget allocated to health in the EU.
Sick people “think about suicide”
For Alexandru Tantu, a 28-year-old HIV-positive computer scientist who lives in Bucharest, the argument of the lack of resources “does not hold up”. “We feel abandoned, hence our anger”, confides the young man to AFP, referring to patients for whom the absence or delay of treatment risks having “irreparable consequences”.
Asked by AFP, the Ministry of Health did not respond but doctors said they were waiting for a first payment of funds following a budget extension approved by the government. If Alexandru says he is “privileged”, citing a stable job, he says he receives calls from patients who “think about suicide”. He also criticizes the State for never having recognized “its historical responsibility”, while most of the deaths caused by AIDS are attributable to it.
About 11,000 children born in the 1980s, under the pro-natalist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, had been infected by the use of unsterilized syringes, in hospitals or orphanages. AIDS was then considered an evil affecting only the “depraved West”.
Shortages of anti-AIDS treatments, Alina Dumitriu, director of the NGO Sens Pozitiv, has already known, but she thought those days were over. Between calls and texts from desperate patients, she sorts tablets – donations received from abroad – which she will send to those whose lives depend on it, dozens of people per week.
It also sometimes supplies hospitals, which “have had to cut the budget for AIDS patients to cope with the influx of serious cases of coronavirus”. If the new therapies prolong life, “these patients still live with fear in their stomachs, not knowing if the next day they will still have medication,” laments Ms. Dumitriu. In her big red bag, she carries pills worth several thousand euros, which has become a “drug trafficker” in spite of herself.
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