The story of Maksym Nikolayenko, an AIDS patient, who died of intravenous drug use, and Vera, who has just discovered her HIV-positive status.
Maksym Nikolayenko, featured in the Dec. 4 Kyiv Post front-page story “Living With AIDS,” has died.
Near the end of his 35-year-old life, Nikolayenko’s outspokenness about AIDS – and Ukraine’s shortcomings in treating those with the disease – inspired others. With Ukraine having the highest HIV adult prevalence in Europe, there are plenty in need of inspiration.
“I am tired of hiding it,” Nikolayenko told the newspaper. “I’ve realized if people keep silent, AIDS will choke all of us.”
But Nikolayenko didn’t die from AIDS, for which no vaccine or cure yet exists. Instead, the Mykolayiv native died on the New Year’s Eve from intravenous drug use, the kind of addiction that led him to become HIV-positive 14 years earlier.
“He never became hysterical. He looked upon his sickness without fear,” said Anton Nikolayenko, Maksym’s older brother. “We never viewed his diagnosis as a death sentence, either.’’
His relatives say they are surprised by his relapse. They thought he had overcome his drug addiction four years ago. “Opium knows how to wait,” his brother said. In September, Maksym Nikolayenko left Mykolayiv for Kyiv to undergo treatment at the Lavra AIDS Clinic.
Somewhere along the line, Anton Nikolayenko said, his brother met up with a friend who reawakened his urge for drugs. The family had expected him home on New Year’s Eve.
While volunteering at one of Mykolayiv’s non-governmental HIV centers, Maksym Nikolayenko met his wife, Anzhela, who is HIV-positive. “He fought for his life and helped others to fight for theirs,” she said. “We supported each other and tried to make others to realize it’s still worth living with HIV.”
That message of hope – that life is still worth living for HIV-positive people – is an important one to a half-million Ukrainians who have contracted the virus. They hope to stave off the onset of AIDS through improving drug therapies and healthy living.
One of them is Vera, 25, who learned of her HIV-positive status in January and contacted the Kyiv Post for information about support groups.
“Jesus, it did happen to me. I got into this percentage,” Vera said, recalling her initial reaction to her HIV test result. “Tears started to take over. I choked them back. I knew if I would start crying, I might never stop.”
Vera, who has a university degree, a passion for ballroom dancing and a new and promising job, said she has never tried drugs and neither had her ex-boyfriend. However, her apprehension about not being the only woman in her former boyfriend’s life prompted Vera to seek out the test center. She agreed to talk on the condition that the newspaper doesn’t publish her surname.
“Once he mentioned, in passing, the number of sex partners he had. It shocked me,” she recalled. “I’ve never dared to call him.” She alerted him to the diagnosis with an SMS message, but the ex-lover never replied.
So far, Vera has only told her three closest girlfriends that she’s HIV-positive. “My parents will have happier lives without knowing it,” Vera said. “Speaking of others, I’m not afraid of discrimination, but I can’t stand sympathy either.”
Being told that one is HIV positive has an oddly liberating effect, she said. “It made me realize that if I can courageously bear the news about being HIV-positive, nothing in this world will scare me, not even an atomic war,” Vera said.
She is glad to be fighting the virus in 2009 and not two decades ago, before life-enhancing and life-prolonging medical advancements were discovered. Still, she remains worried about the future.
“I never realized how close HIV was until I got it,” Vera said. “All anti-AIDS propaganda appears to be futile. My example will at least make my three closest girlfriends forget about unsafe sex. The price is just too big.”
She is determined to enjoy her life and make it count. “I have decided for myself that, even if I have a short life, it will definitely be a great one,” she said.
But the lives of people such as Vera could be enhanced greatly if the Ukrainian government would improve its response to the crisis. Anti-AIDS activists say officials could start by simply having a plan, rather than risking the loss of international assistance. Millions of dollars in foreign grants are at stake.
Anti-AIDS leaders say grants, such as a $120 million one from The Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, are conditioned on their effective use. That’s problematic in Ukraine, where the Verkhovna Rada has failed to adopt a five-year national HIV prevention program.
“We had [an adopted national program] last year and two years ago and before. We don’t in 2009,” said Andriy Klepikov, executive director of the International HIV/AIDS Alliance in Ukraine. Klepikov said that Ukraine should consider dropping its 20 percent tax on foreign aid as well. “It’s like they give us a present and we ask them to pay another 20 percent for it. Ukraine has lost a $96 million grant for tuberculosis. We risk losing or getting a limited amount in the case of AIDS.”
Increasingly expensive AIDS medicine has combined with the steep devaluation of the hryvnia to shrink the value of the government’s budgeted Hr 179 million for HIV/AIDS prevention.
“Real spending by government to fight the epidemic will be about Hr 80 million, which is even less than last year,” said Volodymyr Kurpita, representative of the All-Ukrainian Network of People Living with HIV.
On top of all the funding problems, anti-AIDS advocates have a new worry: The rising price of contraceptives, including condoms. They fear a new spike in the epidemic. “Young people are writing to us, complaining they can not afford condoms,” said Olga Rudneva, director of the ANTIAIDS Foundation. “We called the distributors and found out that, indeed, sales went down by four times.”
