Eurasian Harm Reduction Network issued its yearly note 2009
31.01.2010

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<The economic crisis and financing of harm reduction>
...In Estonia, the Government’s attempt to rationalize the public spending has put the HIV/AIDS treatment programs under the risk. However, it was resolved due to on-time advocacy campaign by Estonian civil society – as a consequence Government renounced its plans to cut down expenses in order to sustain the budget deficit within the EU limits, and patients continue to receive ART within the same measures. In Latvia, health authorities, in an attempt to cut costs, issued “Recommendations on Rational Pharmacotherapy for State-Budget-Covered ARV” which in an early draft included a provision excluding drug users from access to state funded antiretroviral medicines. Though this clause has now been removed from the current draft of the recommendations, there are several aspects in which the recommendations contradict WHO and European AIDS Clinical Society recommendations. The Lithuanian AIDS Center was merged with the Centre for Prevention and Control of Communicable Diseases at the end of the year, making HIV/AIDS testing access rather high-threshold and activists are concerned this will affect the quality and scale of care provided to the people living with HIV/AIDS...
<Opioid substitution treatment>
...The EMCDDA estimates, that OST is being provided to minority of those in need in 10 out of 27 EU countries, 7 of them – Eurasian region – Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia...
Read full report at http://www.harm-reduction.org/news/1645-ehrn-yearly-note-2009.html