A nationwide Ukrainian HIV-testing service, which has detected and referred almost 10,000 cases since Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country, stopped its work abruptly last week.
The METIDA project is funded through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, and is among numerous wartime assistance efforts interrupted by the Trump administration’s 90-day stop-work order and pause on U.S. foreign aid spending.
“It’s really critical to keep the HIV epidemic under control — it’s obvious if people are not getting tested and not knowing their status, they’re spreading the virus,” Andriy Klepikov, executive director of the Alliance for Public Health which delivers the project, told Devex over the phone from Ukraine capital Kyiv.