UNDP in Ukraine

The XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna which took place over 18-24 July 2010 has brought together 19,300 HIV practitioners, scientists, and community leaders representing 173 countries to highlight the important achievements in better understanding of the infection and the mechanisms to control and eventually stop its spread. Vladimir Gordeyko, Project Manager of UNDP's "Governance of HIV/AIDS in Ukraine" Project writes about his impressions on the Conference.

This Year's Conference, entitled 'Rights Here. Right Now', focused on the importance of maintaining and strengthening a human rights-based approach in the fight with the epidemic, enabling all groups involved into the epidemic process to become an active participants and contributors to its success.

It was noted that prevention is bringing tangible fruits and the amount of new HIV infections among young people globally has decreased. Prevention revolution is possible, and treatment should be considered as its integral part. Thus, removing punitive laws, stigma and discrimination which restrict access to services must be at the centre of all prevention efforts.

Ukraine against the global backdrop looked well in the terms of mobilization of the civil society potential (2 Ukrainian CSOs were among the 25 Red Ribbon Award winners), successes in addressing the epidemic (considerable decrease in the HIV prevalence rates among young drug users), developed multisectoral partnership in the response to the epidemic, etc.  At the same time, the epidemic continues to grow with alarming rates – only during the conference period some 3,000 cases of getting HIV infection are estimated to happen in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region.

So in the conditions of restricting funding we all are facing an enormous challenge of doubling efforts in combating HIV/AIDS – since if we continue to maintain current level of interventions, we could only cut new infections by half. This illustrates the necessity to keep an eye on the problem for the foreseeable future.

More information about the conference is available at www.aids2010.org and also in the AIDS 2010 official conference hub in the Kyiv's Hotel “Rus” from 28 till 30 July 2010.  The hub will provide most important and interesting information presented in Vienna to people who could not participate in the conference; and also the possibility to exchange experience between three countries - Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan in the field of confronting the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Photo: the Red Ribbon Award  winners during their award ceremony.