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Evelyne Paradis, Executive Director of international LGBT rights group ILGA-Europe told IPS: \"LGBT activists across Europe have welcomed the outcome of the Slovak vote ... hopefully the referendum will lead to a constructive discussion about equality in Slovakia. At the same time, we know that there is a broad diversity of views in the region which means that much work remains to be done before full equality is realised.\" She said that although state propaganda campaigns had \"switched to 'Ukrainian fascists' and the West\" being portrayed as the public's greatest enemy instead of LGBT people since the annexation of Crimea and the start of the Ukraine conflict, \"state homophobia has not disappeared\". ILGA's Paradis told IPS: \"Unfortunately many political leaders use the LGBT community as scapegoats ... from activists we often hear that they do this to hide 'real problems' in countries, such as youth unemployment, access to education and healthcare. They promote 'traditional family values' as the way to rescue society. Sadly, in doing this, political leaders build a climate of intolerance and hatred.\"

OST patient Andriy Klinemko, who was forced to flee Donetsk with his wife when their house was destroyed in bombing last summer and who is now in Dnipropetrovsk in central Ukraine, told IPS: \"OST patients in East Ukraine are being forced to move, but not all of them can and even those that make it to other regions may not be able to continue OST because there is no money left to run such programmes. It's a bad situation and at the moment I really can't see any way it's going to get better.\" Dr Dorit Nitzan, head of the WHO's Ukraine Office, told IPS: \"Even before the conflict, Roma in Ukraine had limited access to curative and preventive health service. As a result, Roma children have extremely low vaccination coverage. Moreover, rates of tuberculosis and other communicable and non-communicable diseases are higher among Roma than in the general population.\" [Zola Kondur] told IPS: \"In one case a Roma family moved from Kramatorsk to Kharkiv. A little boy had a heart problem brought on by the stress of the fighting and he was taken to hospital. One night, a group of young people broke the window of the boy's hospital room, shouting 'Gypsies get out'. The boy had a heart attack.\"

KIEV, Dec. 9, 2014 (IPS/GIN) - Marginalised communities and THE civil society groups helping them are warning of a \"tragedy\" in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) as international funding for HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) programmes in the regions is cut back. The EECA is home to the world's only growing HIV/AIDS epidemic and is the single most-affected region by the spread of multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB). For years, HIV/AIDS and TB programmes in many of its countries have been heavily, or exclusively, reliant on funding from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. \"I know two people who died waiting to get on an OST programme,\" she told IPS. \"And there are other problems like a lack of needle exchange centres in rural areas, in fact a lack of any harm reduction services in small towns, which leads to high rates of HIV in those places.\"

[Tolekan Ismailova] told IPS: \"Operations like this only reinforce negative images of migrants in Russia and increase violence towards them. Once Russians see images of the raids in the news they will rally to support the government's actions.\" Ismailova told IPS: \"Central Asian migrants are harassed because there is a culture of racism in Russia that perpetuates the stereotype that they are 'black' and they do the 'black' work in Russia. Many Russians have prejudices against Central Asians.\" Tanya Lokshina, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW) in Moscow, told IPS: \"With the ruble suffering an alarming drop, the government is apparently trying to divert people's attention from concerns over living standards by turning their discontent towards migrants and, at the same time, demonstrating its own 'effectiveness' by attacking that 'enemy'.\"

\"Georgia's society is very male-dominated,\" she told IPS. \"And this is reflected in the attitudes to drugs. It's as if it's OK for men to use drugs but not women. For women, the stigma of drug use is massive. There are many women who do not join programmes helping them as they would rather not be seen there.\" Women make up 10 per cent of the estimated 40,000 drug users in Georgia, according to research by local NGOs working with drug users. \"Georgia's society is very male-dominated and this is reflected in the attitudes to drugs. It's as if it's OK for men to use drugs but not women. For women, the stigma of drug use is massive. There are many women who do not join programmes helping them as they would rather not be seen there\" - [Irina], now in her 50s, who has been taking drugs for 30 years Eka Iakobishvili, EHRN's Human Rights Programme Manager, told IPS: \"Pregnant women don't have access to certain services - they are strongly advised by doctors and health care workers to abort a baby rather than get methadone substitution treatment because they are told the treatment will harm the baby.\"

LGBT people say that they are often refused service by businesses and hospitals, bullied in school, and harassed by the police. Meanwhile, the Orthodox Church, which has a hugely influential role in society, has denounced LGBT equality and described support for LGBT rights as the \"propaganda of sin\". Activists are under no illusions about what the laws will bring the LGBT community. When asked whether he expected things to get better for LGBT people in Georgia in the near future, [Irakli Vacharadze] said: \"Definitely not. There's no chance.\" Vacharadze told IPS: \"The law alone will not change society's attitudes towards LGBT people, it won't get rid of homophobia. It won't do anything to deal with the ignorance about LGBT issues and the community.

Dr [Masoud Dara] told IPS: \"There are indications that incidence of TB may increase. TB sufferers need to have medicines provided to them in a timely fashion and if that cannot be done and TB sufferers' treatment is interrupted and they cannot access treatment elsewhere, there is a risk that the disease could then be spread and that people may die. \"We do not have detailed information at the moment on how exactly the conflict has affected the TB situation in Eastern Ukraine, but we do know that it has, at least, affected TB control efforts. It is hard to thoroughly implement checks on all people with TB in the conflict zone.\" \"If conditions improve with regard to the supply of treatment, medicines and provision of health care services then we can foresee some improvement with the TB situation,\" Dr Dara told IPS. \"But without a change in those, then there is little hope that TB treatment can improve.\"

This abuse is typical, she said, of the way many people with the disease are viewed in Russia. TB is common among those at the margins of society - drug users, alcoholics, people with HIV and those in dire poverty. \"In our society, a drug user is not a person and their death from tuberculosis is seen as something they deserve,\" Sintsova, who herself has HIV, told IPS. Others point to the need to provide integrated care for people with co-infections, such as HIV and hepatitis C. Oksana Ponomarenko, Russia country director for the U.S. organisation Partners in Health (PIH) which works with TB patients in Russia, said on the group's website: \"The biggest problem lies in the fact that each health system in Russia is vertical and operates separately -TB, drug addiction services, HIV care, psychiatric services, among other health programs. PIH says that its methods have been adopted as official state policy on TB and legislation was recently brought in to emphasise the importance of ambulatory, rather than institutional, care in TB treatment. The government has also increased spending on TB in recent years, modernised diagnostic equipment and overhauled research institutes specialising in TB.

Michel Kazatchkine, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, told IPS: \"We know from studies that contact with the criminal justice system is associated with increased injection drug use and other similar behaviour, among other problems. Putting drug users in prisons ... is making things worse not just in prisons but also for communities when they are released from prison.\" Kazatchine told IPS: \"I don't see any sign of Russia's approach to drugs softening. What I am seeing is a toughening of the way Russian society looks at marginalised groups, such as drug users, men who have sex with men, LGBT people, etc. The climate has toughened and Russia is de facto criminalising drug use and recession.\" He told IPS: \"Evidence shows that OST reduces mortality, it prevents overdoses among drug users. I think it is inevitable that [with no more OST] more drug users will die.\"

Vladimir Galakhov, a physical geography professor at Altai University in Siberia, told IPS: \"Although many people think the recent floods were caused by snow melting, it was actually intense rainfall. We had two months' rain in one week. Weather models for the next two decades forecast a 10 percent rise in rainfall volumes, so we can expect more flooding in the future.\" He told IPS that the size of Siberia meant that different areas will be affected in different ways: east and south-east Siberia in the area of the Amur River will see more frequent heavy rains and a monsoon climate while southern Siberia near Mongolia will see increasing desertification leading to water supply problems and disappearing pastures to provide feeding grounds for animals. She told IPS: \"We are not talking about a sudden change in climate or global warming, but only periodic temperature fluctuations. A stabilisation of temperatures in Siberia is expected by 2020.\"