Time Out On Holiday Street

If you are HIV+ and you live in Kiev, sooner or later you will visit Holiday Street, for that is the rather inappropriate name of the street where Kiev AIDS Centre is located.

This series of portraits looks at some of the rarely-glimpsed people who, in one way or another, tend to AIDS patients in Kiev and surrounding regions - parents, doctors, nurses, social workers, telephone helpline operators and so on. Many face discrimination for having contact with the infected due to widespread public ignorance, and many do not tell friends and neighbours where they work.

Ukraine is the first European country outside Russia to face an AIDS epidemic on this scale. It is estimated that 1.6% of Ukraine's adult population - nearly half a million Ukrainians - are HIV+. The epidemic has been largely fuelled by drug use and increasingly spread via heterosexual transmission, including through the sex industry. In Kiev, around a quarter of all prostitutes are infected. The stigma attached to being confirmed HIV+ is a powerful disincentive to being tested. General public reaction to the epidemic has been to ostracise those who test positive.