Integration of A.I.D.S. sufferers encouraged

Press, 28 January 1988, Page 6

Integration of A.I.D.S. sufferers encouraged

NZPA-Reuter London Countries which isolate or restrict victims of A.I.D.S. are impeding efforts to curb its spread, according to health experts at the first global conference on the deadly disease. Leading speakers on the first day of the London conference said Governments must avoid discriminating against A.I.D.S. victims if education policies were to succeed. Health Ministers from up to 150 countries as well as A.I.D.S. experts and educators are attending the conference, the largest of its kind. “A national programme will have a great deal of difficulty in educating and informing and achieving a behaviour change if people who are HIV infected... are isolated or excluded or discriminated against,” said Dr Jonathan Mann, the top A.I.D.S. specialist of the World Health Organisation (WHO). The organisation is coordinating the three-day London conference that began yesterday. “If you imagine putting

people who are infected aside in some kind of a separate place ... doesn’t that reflect a lack of confidence in the people who are infected, saying that even with counselling and support you are still not confident that they will not indiscriminately infect others?” Dr Mann asked at a news conference. "Doesn’t that reflect a lack of confidence in the education of the general public?” Dr Mann said the WHO was encouraged that although virtually every country in the world in the last year had considered imposing restrictions against travellers infected with A.1.D.5., only a handful had done so. “We are concerned about that issue because we think that border patrols... will enhance the sense of tension between countries. It will enhance the pressures, the stigmatising, marginalising and the discriminating kinds of pressures,” Dr Mann said. He said stigmatisation of victims with A.I.D.S. — Acquired Immune Defi-

ciency Syndrome — seemed to be declining. But the right sort of leadership was essential to ensure it continued to do so—“ The kind of leadership that was shown by the Pope on his visit to the United States when he embraced a child, a haemophiliac who was infected,” Dr Mann said. In the West, A.I.D.S. — transmitted mainly through sex, sharing infected needles, blood transfusions and from pregnant women to their babies — has so far struck mostly homosexual and bisexual men and intravenous drug users. But the WHO estimates that A.I.D.S. will infect some one million men and women by 1991, with half of the cases transmitted heterosexually. Health experts stressed that only radical changes in behaviour would halt its spread. Evidence emerged at the conference that certain high-risk groups, mainly homosexual men, had already lowered their risk of infection by modifying their sexual behaviour.