EXPERTS WARN PUBLIC HEALTH DISASTER LOOMS

A convoy of five vans snaked slowly Friday from the battered Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, toward Chernihiv, in the northeast of the country. On board were generators, clothes, fuel — and medications needed to treat HIV.

With a main bridge decimated by shelling, the drivers crept along back roads, hoping to reach Chernihiv on Saturday and begin distributing the drugs to some of the 3,000 residents in desperate need of treatment.

Organizers of efforts like this one are rushing to prevent the war in Ukraine from morphing into a public health disaster. The conflict, they say, threatens to upend decades of progress against infectious diseases throughout the region, sparking new epidemics that will be nearly impossible to control.

Ukraine has alarmingly high numbers of people living with HIV and hepatitis C and dangerously low levels of vaccination against measles, polio and COVID-19. Overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions for refugees are breeding grounds for cholera and respiratory plagues like COVID-19, pneumonia and tuberculosis.

“If they don’t get the medicines, there is a high risk that they will actually die because of the lack of therapy, if they don’t die under the shelling,” said Dmytro Sherembei, who heads 100% Life, the organization delivering medications to Chernihiv residents with HIV.

Sherembei, 45, learned he had HIV 24 years ago. He is one of more than 250,000 people in Ukraine living with the virus, a huge epidemic driven largely by the sharing of contaminated needles among intravenous drug users.

Ukraine and the surrounding region also make up a world epicenter of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, a form of the disease impervious to the most powerful medications.

The Ukrainian health ministry in recent years had made progress in bringing these epidemics under control. But health officials now fear that delays in diagnosis and treatment interruptions during the war may allow these pathogens to flourish again.

“Last year, we were working to differentiate between different TB mutations,” Iana Terleeva, who heads tuberculosis programs for Ukraine’s Ministry of Health, said in a statement. “Now instead, we are trying to differentiate between aerial shelling, raids and other military hardware.”

The fighting also has damaged health facilities throughout the country and spawned a refugee crisis, imperiling thousands of people with chronic conditions like diabetes and cancer who depend on continuing care.

“Everything is at very high risk, as it is always in the battlefield,” said Dr. Michel Kazatchkine, a former U.N. secretary-general envoy for Eastern Europe. “We should anticipate major health crises with regard to infectious diseases and chronic diseases across the region that I expect to be severe and durable,” he added.

The war “will have a huge impact on health systems that are already very fragile,” he added.