Africa is criminalising HIV-AIDS sufferers with new laws

MAPUTO, 1 December 2008. PLUS-news, the UN's sponsored news agency, reports that Africa, the continent hardest hit by the HIV-AIDS pandemic, is increasingly adopting laws criminalising people with HIV+ status.

Laws are already on the books in twelve countries including Guinea-Bissau, Niger and Sierra Leone. New laws are pending in Angola, the Congolese republic and Uganda. Irin news warns that the supporters of these laws believe that 'such laws are firmly rooted in human rights and would offer some recourse to the HIV-positive, while protecting those who are HIV-negative." Basically these laws specify that anyone transmitting the Human-Immune Deficiency Virus which causes Aqwuired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) to others is treated under the law as a criminal whose rights to travel and have a family, for instance, are severely restricted - such people are required to disclose their HIV+ status and their doctors and nurses are required to report their status. Countries also arrest HIV+ patients if they transmit their deadly infection to anyone: in some African countries such as Uganda, even involuntary transmission is being criminalised. "Africa has burst into this whole frenetic spasm of criminalising HIV," said South African Justice Edwin Cameron, who also is HIV positive, at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico earlier this year. In Uganda, proposed HIV legislation is not limited only to intentional transmission, but also forces HIV-positive people to reveal their status to their sexual partners, and allows medical personnel to reveal someone's status to their partner. This started in 2004 in West Africa, where most legislative development has taken place after participants from 18 countries met at a regional workshop in N'djamena, Chad, to adopt a model law on HIV-AIDS for West and Central Africa. Some AIDS-treatment activists warn that this would drive the continent-wide pandemic even further underground. They fear that people would not submit to voluntary testing -- fearing that they would be criminalised. Read here XDR-TB plus AIDS coinfected patients to be treated at home in S.Africa: Meanwhile the hardest-hit country -- South Africa, which has an estimated 6-million HIV+ patients of whom 60% are co-infected with Tuberculosis -- has declared a national emergency in its XDR-TB + AIDS epidemic, decimating the population. Their health services are now so overwhelmed that they can no longer enforce their law which forces such infectious patients to be quarantined. Many health workers are also falling ill and often have to wage battles with angry XDR-TB patients escaping from quarantine. Instead, new health minister Barbara Hogan announced on October 28, such XDR-TB patients would now be treated at home by public-health nurses. Families would at the same time, also be educated to avoid infection, she said. Also this week, the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warned that none of the current diagnostics and drugs for XDR-TB + AIDS are effective. The World Health Organisation will have to get newer drugs to patients as soon as possible they warned. New drugs in clinical trials must be rushed through MSF warns here: They said in their report that XDR-TB is particularly alarming in the context of HIV as the co-infected patients often die before test results can confirm their drug resistance. MSF has several clinics in southern Africa -- one of which is in Khayelitsha near Cape Town -- and which uniquely combine TB and AIDS treatment. South Africa's clinics treat the TB- and AIDS-patients seperately. MSF now warns that this deadly co-epidemic cannot be contained. "Business as usual would be a disaster when it comes to treating XDR-TB + AIDS," said Dr. Françoise Louis, MSF 's TB and HIV/AIDS advisor. "XDR-TB has the potential to be devastating in places where HIV/AIDS is widespread. But trying to treat XDR-TB with the tools we have today would be like trying to put out a forest fire with a garden hose." One-million South Africans need antiretroviral drugs: The country's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, (CSIR) has just filed a patent for the manufacture of cheaper antiretroviral drugs which are already in use for the treatment of HIV-AIDS. Its biosciences department's director Gatsha Mazithulela said 'the number of people requiring ARV drugs now is estimated at approaching one million. It is imperative to start producing ARVs locally, and inexpensively.' They were now looking for commercial partners to invest in the local manufacturing of the life-saving drugs, he said in a media statement.