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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Valery IVASIUK: “AIDS in Ukraine is a mirror that reflects the antihuman attitude of the regime toward the individual”

21 September, 1999 - 00:00

Humanity will have to take the HIV/AIDS epidemic, in addition to other pestilence, into the twenty- first century. No radical remedy against this most terrible disease has yet been invented. However, AIDS is no longer so fatal for the civilized world. Scientists have managed to establish its behavior, how it spreads, and can now study the biology of the virus.

Practical medicine has adopted quite effective methods to hold back HIV-infection at the stages of its incubation, of medicinal and preventive treatment. Humanity has learned to neutralize the donor's sexual, injection-related, and partially placenta-related ways of spreading AIDS. In the civilized world, this is being fostered by massive and continuous propaganda in favor of a healthy lifestyle and safe sex. By far the least risk is from infection via donor's blood whose purity is ensured by medicine and the state. Ukraine had reliable barriers to this way of HIV/AIDS spread before 1997. Now, as Candidate of Science in medicine Valery Ivasiuk, scientific expert at the Ukrainian Legal Foundation (ULF) H uman R ights C enter, asserts, he knows of at least twenty cases of HIV infection via untested donor blood or the blood tested by inferior domestic control equipment.

“Mr. Ivasiuk, two years ago you headed the National Committee for Drug Abuse and AIDS Prevention, later disbanded by the President. Do you know any concrete reasons why the dangerous non-tested blood makes its way to hospitals?”

“A month and a half before AIDS broke loose and hit donor blood, when in late 1997 a 43-year- old man and a 9-year-old boy were infected, I addressed the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine with a letter On the Hazards of HIV/AIDS Proliferation via Donor Blood, in which I drew attention to a large number of risk group donors, the absence of compulsory testing before and after blood donation, low skill level of the medical examination of donors, the necessity for high sensitivity diagnostics of blood, and the acute need for other preventive functions. The answer boiled down to the following: your advice is of no use, for the Ministry of Public Health has established the required test procedures at all blood transfusion points.

“The first tragedies almost coincided in time with a different event. At the beginning of last year the President signed changes and amendments to the law On the Prevention of AIDS and the Social Security of Population, the first version of which had been prepared by our committee for Verkhovna Rada discussion. In fact, after the bill was returned to the Cabinet of Ministers for reworking, it appeared again with the amended Articles 10 and 20, which runs counter to existing legislative procedure. One of the amendments allowed doctors, in theory, to transfuse an blood untested for Aids to patients “in cases of emergency” (incidentally, the term is not explained in the law). Another exempted persons guilty of infection from any responsibility.”

“Ukraine was really shocked during the trial, completed on August 12 of this year, of a district hospital where Yuri Chobotar ( Den was the first to report this case 1997) was infected. How would you, a legitimate representative of the aggrieved person in court, assess its decision?”

“As unprecedented. It is for the first time in the whole history of the worldwide AIDS epidemic that a court of law traced a cause and effect relationship between the AIDS infection of a human being via donor's blood and the actions of concrete individuals. By decision of the Novoarkhanhelsk district court, Kirovohrad oblast, the local hospital is to compensate almost one million hryvnias to the resident of the village of Hannivka Yuri Chobotar for the material and moral damage it caused. This case spurred the activity of Ukrainian human rights legislation and even forced one official institution, the court, to defend the aggrieved party. I am sure the tragedy was not accidental, and high officials are involved in it. The district hospital in fact took the rap for the state.

“Just imagine to what extent the domestic system of donor blood safety is ruined to allow AIDS to cross the path of a peasant from a remote village and father of eight! For his infection with non-tested donor blood during an operation in October 1997 occurred not only through the fault of district doctors, reduced to poverty and forced by the existing health-care system to violate the Hippocratic oath. Yes, they are guilty because they failed to procure clean blood from the oblast center, even though they had the time to do so. They also ignored the demands of relatives who offered a healthy donor. They hid from the relatives the true result of laboratory tests when the disease was detected. Finally, they divulged a professional secret to the whole village by telling the collective farm chairman about the diagnosis. However, the scale of the crime is not confined to the district level. It is the oblast blood transfusion station that failed to make sure the transfused blood was safe: to do so, it was enough to be just more attentive when examining the drug addict who became Yuri Chobotar's donor. Medical personnel have to know that the people of this category account for 90% of those HIV-infected, more than 100,000 of them being AIDS carriers in Ukraine. More than 2,000 of such donors had been identified by 1997. Unfortunately, paid donorship attracts risk groups, this is why it is always voluntary, selective, and free in world practice. I once reported on this to the President of Ukraine, yet...

“After Yuri Chobotar, HIV- infection was transfused to an 8 year-old boy from Cherkasy, a cancer patient and a pregnant woman from Chernihiv, and a patient at a Kyiv military hospital... So the crime becomes systemic.”

“Why did the case to protect Yuri Chobotar's civil rights go so slowly and will it end up as a purely local mishap?”

“Ukraine's judicial and legal system, except the Supreme Court, still remains Soviet in content and protects the state, not the individual. The common man has to force his way through all the branches of power. In addition, Ukraine had no precedent for such a trial. There is also not sufficient educational and reliable information about the problems of AIDS and the rights of a person in case of infection, for this kind of information would work against the authorities. Among the subjective reasons is a common fear of people who are afraid of being hounded down. Yes, the Chobotar family were shunned like lepers.

“Incidentally, the position of the media was of great help to us in the trial. But while all were unanimous in medical assessments, the attempt of ULF to unearth the prime causes of the evil found no support among the government- supporting or intimidated media, for the cause-and-effect chain of the Chobotar tragedy leads us to the top echelons. Not only one specific doctor should be punished. Do you remember the recent trial in France concerning the former Prime Minister, Public Health Minister, and Director of the National Blood Bank, who tried in the late 1980s to hamper the import of more advanced testing systems? In my opinion, the spread of the AIDS virus in Ukraine via donor's blood happened through the fault of President Leonid Kuchma and the top officials responsible for Ukraine's national security and health care, who have disorganized the National Blood Service and disbanded the National Committee.”

“This is a serious accusation, and your opponents may link them to the forthcoming elections and high politics.”

“Everything now going on in this state is being assessed in one way or another through the prism of the presidential elections. Under the Constitution of Ukraine, the President is the guarantor of the citizens' right to health care (Article 49), he pursues an official policy in this area through a range of executive bodies and bears personal responsibility for everything that happens. In this sense AIDS is a mirror that reflects the antihuman attitude of the current regime toward the individual. AIDS is not only a medical but also a political matter. The National Committee for Drug Abuse Prevention and AIDS Control included representative of the Ministries of Education, Defense, Information, Justice, Finance, and the Economy, interested in handling the problem. Even former Minister of Public Health Serdiuk admitted after that liquidating what he thought an unnecessary committee the problem was “multisector' and had to be dealt with by the state on a nationwide level. (Incidentally, the President recently ordered the creation of a National Coordination Council for AIDS Prevention attached to the Cabinet of Ministers, headed by Deputy Premier Semynozhenko head and composed of the leading officials of ministries and agencies. It is only not clear why the national committee was disbanded —Ed. ).

“By decision of the 52nd UN session, AIDS was withdrawn from the WHO's sole jurisdiction back in 1995, and a special UN body, UNAIDS, was set up. By the way, its first representation was based in Ukraine because combating the terrible disease was a top-priority task in this country at that time.”

“Some organizations, for example, the non-governmental medical association Pulse of Ukraine, have come out against the use of medical problems in politics.”

“During his election campaign, president Bill Clinton marched under the banner of reforming and strengthening the health care system. This was in the US. In Russia, Grigory Yavlinsky spoke about providing the population with low- cost medicines and medical services during parliamentary debates on confirming in office new Premier Putin. In Ukraine, 28 million people suffer from socially dangerous diseases. According to the WHO, we have 2.7 million tuberculosis cases, almost 80% of the population are infected with Koch's bacilli, there are 1 million drug addicts, 1 million diabetes patients, 780,000 suffer from cancer, and 2 million from mental disorders. 12 million Ukrainian citizens annually fall ill with infectious diseases. Can we possibly keep silent about this? The new President will have first of all, to deal seriously with national health, which will undoubtedly restore people's trust in the state.”

INCIDENTALLY

The first cases of HIV-infection in Ukraine were recorded in 1987. The rate of proliferation is staggering: while 183 infected persons were recorded in 1987-1994, in 1995 this figure rose to 1490, and in 1997 to 180,000. UNAIDS forecasts 1.8 million in 2016, i.e., every twentieth Ukrainian. This rate can be explained by the fact that half the usual critical mass of HIV is sufficient for a Ukrainian resident, whose immune system has been suppressed by Chornobyl-related and other ecological pollution. Syringe related infections accounts for almost 90% of all recorded cases. The AIDS virus changes a million times faster than others. It has a self-constructing mechanism, so new virus families come into being and become modified faster than humanity can invent means of their identification and neutralization.

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