It has been ten years since Svitlana Moroz, from Donetsk in Ukraine, stopped regularly injecting herself with drugs, a decision she made after learning that she was pregnant and HIV positive. Now 30 with two children, she campaigns for injecting drug users (IDUs) to be given help rather than being hunted down. She told IRIN PlusNews her story at the recent XVII International AIDS Conference, held in Mexico City.
"I was 16 when I started taking drugs. I took locally made opium; it was really popular in the Ukraine during the 1990s because it was easy to get hold of and cheap.
"I often got hassles from the [security forces] near places where there were drugs. They humiliated me and touched my body without me giving them permission. They didn't respect me and they took my money.
"In 1998 I went to the hospital - I was pregnant. The doctors told me they had to do some blood tests for my pregnancy, but they didn't explain to me that they were also doing an HIV test. They referred me to the AIDS unit and that's where I was told I was HIV positive.
"I was lost; I didn't know what to do any more. In [the media] AIDS was synonymous with death. My husband was waiting in the corridor and they asked him to get screened; he was HIV positive too.
"When the time came to give birth, none of the doctors wanted to look after me and they were scared of touching me. They put me in a separate room and I stayed there alone for three or four days.
"When my baby arrived it was the wrong way round, feet first. The only people who came in were medical students from the university that the doctors brought to look at me as a medical outing, saying, 'look, she's the one that's HIV positive'.
"There weren't any PMTCT [prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission programmes] then in Donetsk, my region, in the east of the country. After my son was born, waiting to hear about his HIV status was really hard. His first test, at three months, was positive ... finally, at 18 months, my son's test came up negative.
"It was different with my daughter [born in 2008]. I started on antiretroviral treatment in 2004 and my daughter benefited from PMTCT. She's three months old now.
"My husband carried on taking drugs after our son was born but he has stopped since then, thanks to the help of a support group. Around 2004, substitution treatments were introduced in the Ukraine.
"The thing that made me stop was finding out I was pregnant and HIV positive. I said to myself: 'from now on, drugs don't have a place in my life, they have destroyed my health, relationships, and I lost myself' ... I've never gone back to them so far.
"If we want to fight illegal drugs, we must fight the system that makes them possible, not the people who are suffering from dependency. To stop the spread of HIV we must recognise the rights of vulnerable people, including IDUs. It is the only way to do it."
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