On 27 August, Rinat Akhmetov’s Foundation for Development of Ukraine (FDU) in tandem with the State Department of Ukraine for Execution of Punishment rolled out a media tour dedicated to the problem of TB spread in Ukraine’s penitentiary system. The event was a part of the Social Journalism Club established by the FDU. The journalists visited pre-trial detention centre (PDC) in Chernigov town and Chernigov female penal colony No 44 to see the living and treatment conditions. They also talked to the heads of these establishments, patients, prisoners and the convicts, who recovered from TB.

The media tour covered the following issues:

- TB in the penitentiary system: statistics and trends
- What happens to released prisoners, who failed to recover from TB?
- Ways to overcome high TB morbidity in the penitentiary system.

The measures introduced to combat TB ensured a fivefold reduction of TB morbidity in the penal system over the last decade. However, over the six months of 2009 TB spread  has not changed year on year (in 2009 the rate amounted to 535.5 cases per 100,000 people, while in 2008 it was 540.5).

Meanwhile, though the State Penitentiary System of Ukraine has introduced a range of measures to curb TB, the epidemical situation in penal establishments remains tough. This is, first of all, down to numerous patients with active TB in pre-trial detention centres. Resistant strains or TB combined with HIV infection aggravate the situation. Thus, over six months in 2009, PDCs of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine accounted for 982 TB patients, while in 2008 the figure grew to 1,012. Today these patients are taking treatment courses in temporary isolation wards of medical departments arranged within PDCs.

Only twenty per cent of TB patients coming to detention centres diagnosed on arrival, which causes internal TB spread. Over six months in 2009, 62 healthy people contracted TB upon admission.

Check-ups in PDCs across Ukraine prove that no temporary isolation ward follows epidemic-fighting standards. Moreover, no pre-trial detention centre can establish an individual department or a hospital to treat TB patients in line with the current health legislation.

Keeping TB patients in regular sections in PDCs leads to TB spread among other prisoners (convicts), in-house staff and investigators, lawyers and people in general.

 
Natalya Kozhan, Head of the Sanitary Inspectorate, State Department for Execution of Punishment: “The State Penal System of Ukraine displays the processes happening among the population of the country. In 1990s, higher TB morbidity in Ukraine raised the number people with TB infected sent to PDCs. The latter registered 837 TB patients in 1995 and over 1,200 in 1996. In turn, it provoked the growth of TB morbidity in punishment execution establishments”.

Viktoriya Bondar, Manager of the FDU's Stop TB project: “Our Foundation supports major initiatives to combat TB epidemic in Ukraine in a systematic way. The Foundation helped develop a new version of the law On Struggle Against Tuberculosis, which also covers the issues related to TB epidemic in the penal system”.

Since 2007 the FDU has been implementing national program Stop TB to stop TB epidemic in Ukraine. Under this project, the Foundation also runs a pilot regional program Fighting TB Epidemic in Donetsk Region in 2007-2011.

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