In Ungheni, a person who injects drugs can receive sterile syringes in exchange for used ones, a rapid HIV test, condoms and a conversation with a psychologist — free of charge and without being entered into any file. The same services reach women involved in sex work. This is not yesterday’s news: the organisation that provides them has been working in the city for several years. What is new is who pays. Increasingly, the money comes not from foreign donors but from a fund managed by the National Health Insurance Company (CNAM) — that is, from the country’s compulsory health-insurance system.
The turning point has a date — 18 February 2026. On that day, CNAM announced the winners of a competition for multi-year projects on HIV prevention and harm reduction among key groups. Among the four selected organisations is the Union for Equity and Health, with a project that names Ungheni by name.
What people actually receive
The package announced by the organisation is not empty talk but a list of public-health services that also appears on the organisation’s official page:
- exchange of sterile syringes and needles, plus disinfectants, condoms and other protective materials;
- voluntary testing and counselling for HIV, syphilis and viral hepatitis;
- information on pre- and post-exposure HIV prophylaxis (the medication that lowers the risk of infection before or immediately after a risky contact);
- information about tuberculosis and screening for it among beneficiaries;
- social and psychological counselling.
According to the organisation, in Ungheni the services are provided by two field (outreach) social workers and a mobile team, reaching about 300 beneficiaries who use drugs and 250 beneficiaries involved in sex work. These operational figures and the number of people come from the organisation’s public communication; they do not appear in an official CNAM document and should be read as such — as a statement by the service provider, not as independently verified statistics.
The logic behind it is simple and is called “bringing the service close to the community”: if the people at highest risk do not come to the hospital, the prevention service comes to them. And the stakes are not only theirs.
The document: Ungheni, named in a national project
What turns a Facebook post into a verifiable news story is the act behind it. In the 18 February statement, CNAM says in black and white that the project won by the Union for Equity and Health targets “the affected key groups in Orhei municipality, Ungheni and six localities in the north of the republic”. The competition ran from 13 January to 12 February 2026, and four projects scored the highest.
For all four projects together, CNAM announced a total allocation of 33 million lei for 2026–2028, of which 10.2 million lei in 2026 alone, with the goal of reaching about 8,500 beneficiaries in the north, centre and south of the country. Implementation runs from March 2026 to December 2028.
Beware a reading trap, however: the 33 million and the 8,500 beneficiaries are national totals, divided among four organisations. How much exactly goes to the project covering Ungheni, Orhei and the north, the statement does not say. It is a figure missing from the public domain — one worth requesting at source before it is repeated.
From donor money to money from your insurance
The bigger story, though, goes beyond Ungheni. For years, HIV prevention among key groups in Moldova was kept alive mainly by external money, above all through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Since 2003, the Global Fund has invested about 160 million dollars in Moldova for HIV, tuberculosis and, more recently, COVID-19. The problem with any donor funding is that one day it ends.
That is why the state has begun to take over the bill, step by step. Antiretroviral treatment for people living with HIV has been covered from the state budget since 2021. And harm-reduction services — exactly those offered in Ungheni — have started to be contracted from CNAM’s “prophylaxis measures fund”, a fund that finances disease-prevention projects. Its priorities are approved each year by a joint order of the Ministry of Health and CNAM, and HIV prevention among higher-risk groups and tuberculosis screening are explicitly on the list.
In plain terms: part of the contributions we all pay into compulsory health insurance now goes to buy sterile syringes, tests and counselling for those most exposed. Not out of generosity, but out of a cold public-health — and financial — calculation.
Why “key groups”? The logic of a concentrated epidemic
The question many readers have in mind is a fair one: why would the state pay for services precisely for people who use drugs and sex workers? The answer lies in the shape of the epidemic.
The World Health Organization classifies Moldova’s HIV epidemic as “concentrated” — meaning the virus circulates far more intensely in certain groups than in the general population. International estimates show that among people who inject drugs, HIV prevalence is on the order of 11%, against under 0.4% in the general population — tens of times higher. Prevention where the risk is concentrated breaks chains of transmission that would otherwise, sooner or later, reach the rest of the community too — through partners and families.
The national figures give the measure of the problem. According to the National Agency for Public Health (ANSP), the Republic of Moldova had 16,549 people registered with HIV cumulatively (2024 data), with 880 new cases in 2024 alone and nearly 9,000 people on antiretroviral treatment. On the positive side, AIDS-related deaths have fallen, from 338 in 2020 to 241 in 2024 — a sign that access to treatment works. The main route of transmission remains sexual (over 90% of cases according to the latest public breakdown, from 2020), which shows that prevention concerns not a “closed group” but anyone.
A necessary caveat for any “Moldova-wide” figure: the data are reported separately for the right bank of the Dniester and for the Transnistrian region, and the two series are not mixed.
Tuberculosis enters the equation too
The tuberculosis screening in the Ungheni package is not a bureaucratic detail. Moldova is among the countries with a significant burden of tuberculosis, including drug-resistant forms, and TB and HIV often go together: according to WHO estimates, about 12% of TB cases in Moldova occur in HIV-positive people. Looking for TB precisely in vulnerable groups, where both infections are more frequent, means catching it early — and keeping a contagious disease that, untreated, strikes everyone, from spreading.
What we don’t know — and why it matters
An honest article also states what it cannot confirm. Three things remain, for now, outside the public documents.
First, the exact sum allocated to the project covering Ungheni: the CNAM statement gives only the total for the four projects. Then, the local figures — those 300 plus 250 beneficiaries, the two field workers, the mobile team — which come from the organisation’s communication, not from an official act. And finally, the HIV situation in Ungheni itself: there are no public data broken down by district. Official reports go down to the national level and to the right-bank/east split, but not to district level, and the National Bureau of Statistics does not produce such data — they are, if they exist, in the internal records of ANSP and the territorial public-health service.
What we do know is the demographic context into which this money lands: Ungheni district had 75,640 inhabitants in 2024 and about 74,500 in 2025 (preliminary data), after a decline of roughly 21% over ten years. In a district losing people year after year, every function of the health system that holds — including prevention in hard-to-reach groups — weighs more, not less.
What the evidence says about harm reduction
Needle exchange programmes everywhere in the world raise a moral question: are we not “encouraging” drug use? The evidence gathered by the WHO, UNAIDS and the UNODC consistently points the other way. Needle exchange and substitution therapy do not increase drug use, but they significantly reduce the transmission of HIV and hepatitis, overdoses, and the costs the whole health system would otherwise bear. The needle exchange programme has operated in Moldova since 1999, and its public-health logic is today part of national strategies.
This does not erase the sensitivity of the subject in a small community, where anonymity is hard to keep and prejudices are real. That is precisely why the way such a service is hosted and communicated locally matters almost as much as its funding. And the fact that the money now comes from a public fund, subject to state rules and reporting, shifts the conversation from “charity done by NGOs” towards “a health policy owned by the state” — with everything that means for the transparency of the figures.
The figures on the project competition, the 33-million-lei value and the 8,500-beneficiary target come from the CNAM statement of 18 February 2026 and are national totals for the four winning projects; the breakdown for the project covering Ungheni has not been made public. The list of services and the local operational figures (two field workers, a mobile team, 300 + 250 beneficiaries) come from the public communication of the NGO Union for Equity and Health and are not confirmed by an official document. The national epidemiological data belong to ANSP (the HIV situation, 2024 data) and the WHO (tuberculosis); the population of Ungheni district is from the National Bureau of Statistics. There are no public HIV data broken down for Ungheni district — none was estimated or taken from other sources. As of publication, Triunghi.md had not obtained a reaction from CNAM, ANSP or the organisation; the information is based on official, publicly available documents and data.