Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Dec 1 2005 (IPS) – No matter how great an effort is made to guarantee the privacy of people living with HIV, the AIDS virus, this right continues to be constantly violated in most countries around the world.
In the northwest African country of Mauritania, for example, women need permission from their husbands to undergo an AIDS test, Doctors of the World said Thursday, World AIDS Day.
The Dominican Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS, which advocates the free distribution of antiretroviral drugs, reports that doctor-patient confidentiality is still regularly infringed in the Dominican Republic.
The creation of a national registry of people living with HIV in Spain and the anonymous AIDS testing promoted in Latin American countries like Mexico have raised concerns about the privacy of patients.
This is a problem around the world, and in Cuba as well, said Juan Raúl Valdés, with the support line for people living with HIV, a project launched by the National Centre for the Prevention of Sexually Transmitted Infections and HIV/AIDS.
Underlying the need to respect each person s right to decide whether or not to reveal their HIV seropositive status is the stigma and discrimination faced on a daily basis by most of the 40.3 million people currently living with the virus worldwide.
Related IPS Articles
In Cuba s case, it is not a question of people being left unprotected by the laws, because confidentiality is legally recognised here. But when you get down to the bottom of it, you run up against the need to reveal the diagnosis, Valdés told IPS.
For example, HIV/AIDS patients must reveal their status in order to have access to the special allowance of food products made available to them by the socialist government at subsidised prices, or to qualify for labour benefits or the humanitarian aid provided by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Although there is no requirement that people living with HIV reveal their status to receive these benefits, there is also no mechanism to ensure that the information remains confidential.
For Valdés, it is not a problem. The delivery man from the market brings the things to my house, and I don t care if he knows.
But, he added, there are people who have not overcome the consequences of the diagnosis and their fear of discrimination.
In this Caribbean island nation of 11.2 million, just 6,827 cases of HIV/AIDS have been recorded since 1986.
Cuba s AIDS prevention programme initially adopted strict measures to curb the spread of the virus, such as the system of sanatoriums.
The publicly announced diagnosis was hepatitis B, but once we were interned in the sanatorium, everyone knew what we had, recounts a woman who spent almost ten years living against her will in a sanatorium on the outskirts of Havana.
The woman, who was infected by her husband, was forced to leave her job and everything else in her life behind.
I saw my son every once in a while. I did everything possible to keep him from finding out, but he found out anyway, she said.
Even today, roughly 1,900 of the 5,422 people currently known to be living with HIV/AIDS are interned in the 14 sanatoriums throughout the country.
Some are there because the living conditions in their own homes are lacking, or simply because they choose to live there. Others have been admitted to the institutions because a multi-disciplinary committee has ruled that they are not responsible enough to protect their own health and that of others.
People with HIV/AIDS in Cuba who opt for outpatient treatment and continue to work are provided with sick leave certificates when needed which do not specify that they are HIV-positive.
In countries like Costa Rica, where laws have been passed to guarantee the right to privacy of people living with HIV/AIDS, there have also been exceptions established in which this confidentiality can be broken, although these are limited to cases of criminal proceedings or divorce.
In the midwestern U.S. state of Illinois, the Public Health Department is obliged to inform the school principal if a student under the age of 21 is HIV-positive. The principal in turn must notify the school s medical personnel and the student s teachers.
Non-governmental organisations in Mexico, such as Women Health Leaders, are calling for the creation of mechanisms that would make it mandatory to inform the partner of someone diagnosed with HIV/AIDS.
Many believe that measures like the one advocated by the Mexican activists are needed to curb the growing feminisation of the epidemic. According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), the number of women around the world infected with HIV reached 17.5 million this year, which is one million more than in 2003.
Studies carried out in a number of different countries in Latin American and the Caribbean have shown that the risk of HIV infection for many women depends almost exclusively on the sexual conduct of their male partners, and this holds true for the large majority of women who are in what they believe to be stable relationships with a single partner.
According to Valdés, the important thing is for all those who are HIV-positive to be aware of when there is a need for their condition to be known.
He said that accepting one s HIV-positive condition is a way of working against discrimination and stigmatisation and the only possible means to prevent the epidemic from spreading further.
He believes that only facing up to the disease and being well informed will make it possible to overcome the fear of insisting on the use of condoms, of being tested for HIV/AIDS, and of caring for the health of others. If we get rid of the discrimination and stigma, we can stop the epidemic, he maintained.
No Responses