Since the Vienna Express campaign was launched on May 20 in Dushanbe, it has collected over 6,000 wishes about the response to HIV on its journey through 14 countries of Europe and Central Asia. During the final leg of the trip, at the AIDS2010 conference in Vienna, the wishes were displayed on the East-West Wish Tree in the Global Village. During the conference, thousands more wishes were added from delegates from the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australasia. The Vienna Express has truly been a force for bringing people together to demand a better global response to HIV and more investment into the response in Eastern Europe and Central Asia!

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During the recent AIDS2010 conference in Vienna, the campaign organised by AIDS Foundation East-West (AFEW), The Vienna Express 2010: Towards Universal Access, attracted worldwide media attention. In particular, a major focal point of the Global Village was the East-West Wish Tree, which carried over 6,000 messages about access to HIV prevention, treatment and care from participants of Vienna Express events in 14 countries and from conference delegates.

Articles and interviews about the Vienna Express were published in the local media across the 14 countries of the campaign (for example, see ‘Samara Today’ in Russia, ‘ATN Kharkiv TV’ in Ukraine), in the national press (‘The Independent’ in the UK, ‘Komsomolskaya Pravda’ in Moldova, ‘Hindustan Times’ in India, ‘China Daily’, ‘France 24’, ‘Die Presse’ in Austria), in the specialist press (Russia’s noaids.ru, healthdev.net) on partner websites (AIDS Action Europe, Society Association HIV in Latvia, World AIDS Campaign), news engines run by international agencies (UNAIDS, UNICEF), on popular blogs (see Mark E. King’s blog, the AIDS2010 blog, International HIV/AIDS Alliance) and on discussion fora (Poltava Forum).

Yesterday, a panel discussion dedicated to HIV in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) took place at the AIDS2010 conference in Vienna. The session was conducted in both English and Russian – the first time that Russian has been used as an official language at an international AIDS conference. Our staff (from AIDS Foundation East-West – AFEW) have appreciated this move by the conference organisers. After all, the predominantly Russian-speaking region of Eastern Europe and Central Asia is the region with the world’s fastest growing HIV epidemic and the Russian-speaking world must be welcomed and included as much as possible in the international discussion on HIV.

Highlights of the session included the speech by Shona Shonning of the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network in which she analysed the spending patterns on HIV-related programmes in EECA. She noted that while spending has increased in recent years, there is still very little money spent on HIV prevention among the most at-risk groups. In Russia, for example, almost nothing is spent on HIV prevention programmes for injecting drug users and other at-risk people.

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