As the war dragged on, crisis response organizations realized they needed to be flexible and think beyond fixed, brick-and-mortar medical infrastructure. They needed ART to reach people, treatment interruptions could contribute to drug resistance, and harm reduction programs needed to be continued and scaled up.
Andriy Klepikov, executive director of the Alliance for Public Health, a non-profit focused on HIV and tuberculosis, said his team has deployed 37 mobile clinics from Lviv in the west to Kharkov in the northeast. , providing more than 109,000 consultations and conducting more than 100,000 tests. 90,000 people participated in the treatment of infectious diseases, delivered nearly 2,000 tons of humanitarian aid and medical supplies to 200 health facilities, and connected small villages that would otherwise have been doomed.
Equipped with bulletproof vests, helmets and metal detectors, allied staff headed for recently liberated cities and villages just a few kilometers from the front line. “We work where no one works, where there are no hospitals, no pharmacists, no doctors,” says Klepikov.
They switched vans to bikes last summer when fuel became hard to come by. In his office in Kiev, Klepikov proudly presented me with a picture of one of the allied doctors performing manual treatments in the shell-shattered city while riding a bicycle provided by his organization. showed.
Preliminary data show that disaster – at least for now – has been averted. As of the end of 2021, just two months before the war began, about 132,000 Ukrainians living with HIV were on ART. Since then, that number has only dropped slightly to her 120,000, according to the latest figures available. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s public health department has connected 12,000 new people to ART. The latest available data for February 2023 show that more people started taking her PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) during 2022 than in the previous four years.
These successes came at a great personal cost. Racinska herself has lived with HIV for more than 15 years, but she continued to work in Kiev as air raids rang out in the capital. Her mother fled to Italy with her youngest son, Ms. Racinska. She has only visited him a few times since then, but she hopes that she will be back in Naples this October before his 11th birthday. .
Racinska said she could have joined them, but her work, which she calls them “her people,” takes precedence. Her son isn’t against her, she says. “I’m like, ‘Mommy, Mommy’s doing something good for people,’ so please forgive me,” she said through tears. Her son often replies, “Okay, do your job.”
In Krivi Lee, Lee, 47, said early in the war, at-risk populations such as drug users, people living with HIV, sex workers, LGBTQ+ people and those recently imprisoned were likely to be shunned. He says he noticed and built a makeshift shelter. Other spaces that serve as shelters. Securing funding from his UNAIDS and logistical support from the Public Health Charitable Foundation, he set out to rescue people on his own.
