HIV in the World Today

This article was written by AIDS Calgary’s Case Manager.

As some of you may know, this year’s theme in the world of HIV is “Getting to Zero: Zero New HIV Infections, Zero Discrimination and Zero AIDS Related Deaths.” The United Nations (UN) recently published their World’s AIDS Day Report and there have been some great improvements in reducing the rates of HIV. The number of new annual infections has decreased by 21% in the past 15 years, much of this due to advances and accessibility of antiretroviral treatment. The UN estimates that over 700,000 deaths were prevented in 2010 due to the availability of medications and the incident rate of HIV has decreased in 33 countries around the world. Great news indeed!!

While there have been significant improvements in many countries to decrease the transmission and deaths from HIV, there are some areas of the world where this is not the case. Rising rates in Eastern Europe and Central Asia are due to injection drug use and has led to a 250% increase of people living with HIV. It is reported that Russia and Ukraine have contributed to 90% of new infections in the region of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. There are agencies in this area that recognize the value of harm reduction and are working with communities and injection drug users (IDU’s) to decrease the risk of HIV and HEP C transmission.

The Eurasian Harm Reduction Network (EHRN) works in 29 countries and their mission is to “to promote humane, evidence-based harm reduction approaches to drug use, with the aim of improving health and protecting human rights at the individual, community, and societal level.” The EHRN advocates for Opioid Substitution Therapy (OST), such as methadone, as a way to decrease the rates of HIV and HEP C and to improve the lives of some of the most marginalized populations. They estimate that the majority of IDU’s in the regions that they serve are opioid users, though there are still barriers (government and societal) in ensuring that the IDU’s are receiving the treatment they need. The introduction of OST treatment centres has been shown to have a positive impact on reducing the transmission rates in the short amount of time that they have been operational in a number of countries. Unfortunately the benefits of OST are not being seen in Russia as they have not been legalized for use.

This is not to say that there is not work being done in Russia to combat the rising rates of HIV and HEP C; ESVERO is a grassroots organization founded in 2003 and works with IDU’s, activists and service providers to promote change through advocacy, community development and information exchange. Their aim is to promote harm reduction messaging in their country and they offer several training opportunities for outreach workers to increase their knowledge of harm reduction techniques when working with vulnerable populations. In the short amount of time that harm reduction strategies and programs have been implemented in Russia (since 1996), there are now over 70 harm reduction projects throughout the country. Hopefully the next 15 years can see an even larger network of harm reduction programming, as well as access to OST and laws that recognize and support harm reduction methods.

References
http://www.unaids.org/en/media/unaids/contentassets/documents/unaidspublication/2011/JC2216_WorldAIDSday_report_2011_en.pdf
http://eng.esvero.ru/
http://www.harm-reduction.org/activities.html