IPS examines challenges to slowing spread of HIV in Eastern Europe, Central Asia

"Despite pledges from governments across Eastern Europe and Central Asia to fight HIV/AIDS -- one of the eight Millennium Development Goals -- the region has the world's fastest-growing HIV epidemic," Inter Press Service reports in an article examining challenges to stemming the spread of the disease, particularly among injection drug users. "Punitive drug policies, discrimination and problems with access to medicines and important therapy are all driving an epidemic which is unlikely to be contained, world experts say, until governments in countries with the worst problems change key policies and approaches to the disease," the news service writes. According to experts and activists, a lack of opiate-substitution therapy (OST) and needle-exchange programs, as well as discrimination against and "active persecution" of drug users who try to access therapy programs, contributes to the spread of HIV, IPS notes (Stracansky, 9/3).