As of 3 years ago, Serbia stopped being eligible for funding from the Global Fund, which resulted in the closure of harm reduction programs around the country. Our movie gives you a glimpse of the desperate situation faced by injecting drug users in Serbia, and also explores the consequences of the closure of needle exchange programs in Belgrade, whilst trying to assess the current situation in the country!<\/p>\n
As a country Serbia is at the crossroads of a number of heroin trafficking routes. It has a significant population of injecting drug users – 20,000 according to the official estimates. Thanks to grants from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, several harm reduction services were introduced during the first decade of this century. Approximately two thousand people enrolled in opiate substitution programs, and four needle exchange programs provided sterile equipment to injecting drug users. The prevalence of HIV among drug users was low, though access to harm reduction services was far from adequate \u2013 the best indicator of risk being the high prevalence of Hepatitis C infections.<\/p>\n