Open Letter to the Romanian Government
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29.04.2010

E-mail: aras@arasnet.ro;  http://www.arasnet.ro 

We are writing with great concern in order to point out a situation which is taking place in Romania at this very moment. Despite the fact that the local authorities have committed repeatedly to ensuring universal access to treatment for all HIV positive patients eligible for it, there are people who are facing an earlier death because of the incompetence of the very same representatives. These authorities are directly responsible for putting together and implementing the procedures of acquisition of specific antiretroviral treatment which is vital for the survival of people living with HIV and AIDS.

We have all the reasons to say that the failure of these strategies has led to the current state in which patients from all across the country no longer receive their monthly therapies with regularity. In some counties this has been going on for two weeks now, in others for a whole month. Some of the patients have been directed by their doctors towards the hospitals from Bucharest in order to get their supplies. Thus the treatment started to be delivered every two to three days, instead of once a month and huge queues started to appear in front of the Institute for Infectious Diseases „Prof. dr. Matei Balş” from the Romanian capital. 

We sign this letter as members of the associations which represent and provide services for people living with HIV and AIDS. With this document we specifically demand that the Romanian government take responsibility for the current situation of those who are living with HIV and AIDS. We want to signal that by not respecting their commitments and by breaking the legislation, including Article 3 from The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the Romanian government literally condemns these people to a certain death.

Our main concern is that the interruption of antiretroviral treatment ot therapy (ARVT) puts an imminent danger on the people who have this virus, especially on the youngsters who got HIV in the Romanian hospitals during their early childhood, between 1986 and 1992. These are patients who have tried several drug regimens in past, some of them being already at their last treatment option. We want to stress that by interrupting their treatment intake, the patients are very likely to develop resistance towards these drugs. This resistance is the one which will deter them from resuming the treatment at the moment, which is right now impossible to predict, in which the Romanian state will start to deliver the lifesaving drugs once again.

For over twenty years now we kept hearing the Romanian authorities invoking the lack of funding as the main reason for its repeated mistakes. This lack of financial resources is fueled at present also by the economical crisis. But this international crisis is far from being enough justification for not applying a coherent economical plan, for the incorrect management of local funds or for failing to organize treatment auctions on time.

In sum: the authorities in charge just keep forgetting that there might be some solutions more at hand, like for example, a proper negociation between the Romanian government and the pharmaceutical companies in order to obtain a significant price cutting for the ARVT. We also suggest that our government take a close look to a similar situation in which our Bulgarian neighbors used quite successfully a recently signed document known as The Declaration of Bremen (see Anex 1). This allowed them to surpass a local crisis which had involved the treatment that people living with HIV and AIDS need to take on a regular bases in order to have their survival insured.