10/21/2009 • 11:12 pm Comments Off on 21.10.2009 Take the survey if you are HIV positive
A survey about stigma and HIV and AIDS – help to assess the problem with your own experience:
THE TROUBLE WITH STIGMA
http://www.poz.com/phpESP/public/survey.php?name=POZ158_October_2009_Survey
Filed under: HIV and AIDS, Society and living environment, people living with the virus, stigma, survey
10/17/2009 • 11:07 pm Comments Off on 17.10.2009 Silent into the grave
No, no, it’s fine. Everything’s okay. Whenever we ask Maggie how she is doing, she always gives the same answer. But we can see that she is getting thinner and weaker by the day. It’s obvious that she struggles to clean the rooms in our guesthouse, she visibly strains just shaking pillows or emptying the bins. And yet she insists: Don’t worry about me. Maggie has worked at the Mediterranean Villa for two years. She is 48 years old. Her husband died in 2004, and since then she has had to find her own way with three children. The two older daughters don’t work, the youngest smokes Tik – crystal methamphetamines – which is all the rage in Cape Town’s drug scene. It’s disastrous for the whole family. While the mother works, the daughter sells all the household’s possessions to buy more drugs. But the money is never enough to gratify her addiction. Maggie’s daughter enters a vicious cycle of crime: she steals, she is arrested, mother bails her out, she does not reform, is arrested again, etc. And Maggie works and earns the money needed to bail her out.
But soon Maggie won’t be able to do that any more, because there is a disorder about which she doesn’t want to talk. She also doesn’t want to see a doctor. All our efforts at persuading her are futile. She makes excuses: “Let it be, it’s fine, I have no time for doctors, it’s just the stress.” Both of us know that it isn’t stress, but the stigma. It’s the dread of being marked out and ostracised if her neighbours in the township should know what ails her. That disease: HIV/Aids. It’s always others who get infected – neighbours, strangers, outsiders. The stigma is remorseless. It draws on ignorance, rumours, credulity and moral failure. It leads to the exclusion of the affected. “Don’t touch me”. “Use another toilet.” One hears such phrases every day. And sometimes: “You’re not one of us any more.”
It’s like a social death penalty – and that happens in a culture which proclaims the principle of ubuntu. A keyword in Africa’s mutually supportive societies, it can be defined as one being human only through other people. Aids. Maggie won’t even say the word. Her husband’s death certificate also doesn’t say what exactly caused his death. He just was very ill. Nobody needs to know more. And that’s why so many people refuse to go to a doctor. “No problem; it’s not that bad.” Always the same excuses, the same pleading, the same silent complaints, and sometimes also tears – and it goes on like this for weeks. Finally, in November 2006, I prevail and take Maggie to the doctor for a blood test. She refuses to accept the result. No, she doesn’t have this sickness; she isn’t ill. The doctor puts her off work for six months. She gets weaker and weaker, her body is falling apart; it’s too late for the medications which could extend her life. Soon, on a sunny January morning, she dies. The fear of stigmatisation killed Maggie – a fate shared by many thousands of her fellow HIV-positive South Africans.
from the book: Gott,AIDS, Afrika – Kiepenheuer & Witch Verlag 2007
Filed under: HIV and AIDS, Society and living environment, Aids, death, hiv, people living with the virus, stigma, ubuntu
10/09/2009 • 10:41 pm Comments Off on 09.09.2009 a new arrest in Germany
A 49-year-old man is arrested in Germany for having sex without a condom with two women. It is alleged that the man did not disclose his status before having intercourse. I must say that the German tabloids are at their best when it comes to such stories. First the German singer, arrested with lots of publicity – and now the next case.
I must say that I don’t agree with the basics of such cases. If consent adults have a sexual relationship or a sexual affair both parties are responsible to negotiate safe or unsafe sex. It cannot be that only one of the two takes the full blame and consequently legal punishment while the others are portrait as pure victim. My sense of justice and fairness does not agree.
I do agree that there must be consequences when somebody lies in knowledge of his or her HIV infection when asked before having sex or he or she is not insisting on condom to prevent infection.
For the prevention work of HIV and the quest to de-stigmatise the infection, those cases are a nightmare – and they are handled in a fashion which basically adds to stigmatization and will produce at the end less testing and more infections. The criminal code is not a good tool to prevent infections or combat HIV and AIDS.
Filed under: General, HIV and AIDS, HIV Prevention, Politics and Society, Aids, arrest, condom, criminal, Germany, hiv, infection, people living with the virus, prevention work, stigma
09/22/2009 • 4:56 pm Comments Off on 22.09.2009 more fundamental questions…
In the last days I described my stance on mandatory testing and the pre-testing counseling. Having now more time to dedicate my energy towards the HIV/AIDS portfolio, there are more topics I feel are necessary to persue in the coming months and years. I have spoken already about the need to end the stigmatization within the health sector itself. On the political front I can forsee to look more intensive into the question of travel freedom of people living with the virus. The ban to visit certain countries or the ban to get a work permit if you are HIV positive as you can find it in Australia, Singapore and many other countries is not only a sign of a lack of maturity of politicians in the respective countries but also a clear violation of human rights. I am aware that the UN, but also the German “AIDS Hilfe” is dealing with the issue, but we should all join hands and start to pressurize political systems allowing such violations of dignity and human rights.
In some of the blogs I mention the work with HIV positive priests and religious as well as seminarians. This is indeed a very tricky question and I hope that in October, when I am in Rom to meet together with Joachim Franz with the papal council for health care workers, to get this council on board to have a hard look how we deal with HIV and AIDS in our own ranks. Is the refusal to take a HIV positive person into e.g. monkhood or a seminary not a sign of fear and immaturity of the church? Are we as a church really allowed to deal with infected people in refusing them to follow their vocation? I am sure that God does not mind the status of a person. So we also shouldn’t mind the HIV status of a person. What kind of AIDS policies are regulating the life of the church and their institutions? Do we advocate the acceptation of people living with the virus only for the area outside the church? Tough questions, but we owe it the greater love of God to check our own balances on those questions and see whether they add up.
The ethical question of ceasing treatment if somebody does not adhere at all – also a tricky question. I mentioned the criminal law as a tool of prevention, which I find absolutely unreasonable in the way it is administered in most countries, specially also here in Africa.
Those are some of the questions in my mind, where I would like to contribute towards a solution which ends the madness of stigmatization and discrimination, which forces governments and churches to act reasonable and always upholding the dignity and human rights of every person.
Filed under: General, HIV and AIDS, HIV Treatment, Medical and Research, Networking, Politics and Society, advocacy, Africa, Aids, aids hilfe, australia, catholic church, Church Matters, criminal law, dignity, discrimination, hiv, HIV Treatment, human rights, medical stigma, papal council for health care worker, people living with the virus, priests, priests living with HIV, religious, Rome, seminarians, singapore, stigma, travel ban, travel restrictions, UN, vatican, vocation
09/20/2009 • 9:11 am 1
Mandatory HIV testing ‘violates their rights’
(IOL website 19.09.09)
Mandatory testing for HIV would violate the rights of people, the SA Human Rights Commission said on Friday. This comes after provincial Health MEC Theuns Botha announced plans to introduce legislation in the Western Cape to have every patient at every health facility tested for the virus. Botha says the move is the final onslaught in the fight against the disease.
Currently 200 000 people in the Western Cape are estimated to be HIV-positive and 63 000 are on ARV treatment. Botha has started the ball rolling to draw up legislation which he anticipates will be ready by next March. He said the legislation was necessary as people had “avoidance” behaviour and chose to not be tested.
Dr Mark Heywood, of the Aids Law Project, agrees with the rights commission. The Treatment Action Campaign was divided on the issue, spokesperson Rebecca Hodes said. Steven Ngobeni, the national HIV and Aids health rights co-ordinator for the commission, said yesterday mandatory testing “does not make sense”. People, he said, often did not know their rights, counselling at voluntary testing centres was not up to scratch and universal access to treatment was not readily available. Both Ngobeni and Heywood said the provincial government would make a greater impact by educating people about HIV and testing. Heywood said: “There is no way that you could justify a law to introduce mandatory testing.” It was also wrong from a public health and HIV management perspective. “I would suggest a public campaign to get people to go for testing. Right now people are avoiding being tested as there is too little information and routine offerings are haphazard.” He said a law would not work. “People will still be scared of a diagnosis and they could in fact completely avoid health care facilities.” The TAC’s Hodes said mandatory testing in Botswana had been successful but it had been rolled out as part of a broader ARV treatment campaign.
“Some say mandatory testing will increase stigma, others say it will destigmatise the disease. But if testing becomes mandatory there should be proper support,” she said. Botha said on Friday it was a two-pronged approach – testing as well as getting people into treatment sooner. “We would introduce people much earlier into a treatment programme,” he said.
An interesting article and I would like to add: We have to make HIV testing as normal as any other testing. Which would mean in a first step to remove all “extra doors & extra benches” for HIV testing, counseling, treatment and so on..” I even think we can stop the pretest counseling. Like any other diseases we have to advise after a diagnose and not before. If somebody has cancer, we also do not put him or her through a lengthy intimate process before he or she is allowed to have a result.
Being HIV positive is a medical condition in this frameset, let’s treat it as such.
Filed under: HIV Prevention, HIV Treatment, Politics and Society, Society and living environment, Aids, aids law project, counseling, hiv, HIV Treatment, HOPE Cape Town Association & Trust, human rights, stigma, testing, western cape
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