Kiev may be facing an unprecedented tuberculosis crisis. This is according to Larissa Kanarovskaya, the Head of the Kiev City Union of health workers. On December 1, 2014, at a press conference (a video in Russian can be seen here), she announced that on the average, 100 people die every day in Ukraine’s capital, of which one case is from active tuberculosis. The situation, Mrs Kanarovskaya continued, is complicated by an acute shortage of doctors and nurses of TB profile, as well as a critical situation in Ukraine’s health care in general. The growing workload on health workers is accompanied by more and more TB cases being detected among physicians.

In 2014 the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria started implementing its new funding model (NFM). The NFM aims to re-allocate its resources away from middle-income countries towards those with the highest burdens of disease and the least ability to pay.  For the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) - the single most-affected region in the world by the spread of multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) – a loss of eligibility for Global Fund funding is bad news.

TB is both the most significant AIDS-related disease and the leading cause of death in PLHIV in Ukraine. The dual epidemics of TB and HIV continue to have significant impacts in the country, and pose multiple challenges for effective management and treatment of people living with HIV and TB.