Travel restrictions for people with HIV/AIDS
Globalisation has made the world a much smaller place with ease of transport and greater accessibility in literal and figurative terms. People travel a lot more than what they used to earlier. Despite condemnation at the global level regarding travel and entry restriction for people infected with HIV there are some countries that place such entry restrictions, with a few even banning visits just for short trips like tourism or business travel. Such restrictions have been condemned by organisations such as UNAIDS, who point out that they serve no useful purpose at all but are highly discriminatory.
Since the late 1980s the United States has effectively banned routine entry for people with HIV. If you’re HIV-positive and want to visit the US you have to go through a very complex procedure and obtain a special visa which can take months to obtain. People with HIV who have travelled to the US without this visa have sometimes been stopped by immigration or customs officials, detained, and deported. On World AIDS Day last year, the US president, George Bush, announced that he’d issued instructions to allow “a more streamlined process” for the issuing of entry visas for people with HIV.
But new draft guidelines issued by the US government suggest that people with HIV will still have to obtain special permission to enter the country and will only be allowed to visit the US twice in any twelve-month period for visits of less than 30 days.
The draft guidelines still require people with HIV to visit a US embassy or consulate before their planned visit and to declare that they have HIV. For a visa to be issued, it’s also necessary for a person with HIV to be in good health, have enough medication for their proposed visit, and to understand the “nature, severity and communicability of HIV.”
This immediately eliminates anyone wanting to visit another country for medical treatment purposes.
But more than anything what it does is the exact opposite of normalizing the disease. By placing specific restrictions only for HIV countries like the USA are perpetuating the fear, discrimination and ignorance that experts have been trying so hard to dispel since two decades.
The restrictions violate the basic human rights of HIV infected people failing to recognize that they are individuals with legitimate needs like other people. A simple wish that a person might have of seeing the world could become a battleground for medico-legal issues due to such travel restrictions.
Moreover such a hypocritical attitude by USA is detrimental to the fight against AIDS and totally against the democratic image that Uncle Sam tries to project.
Since the late 1980s the United States has effectively banned routine entry for people with HIV. If you’re HIV-positive and want to visit the US you have to go through a very complex procedure and obtain a special visa which can take months to obtain. People with HIV who have travelled to the US without this visa have sometimes been stopped by immigration or customs officials, detained, and deported. On World AIDS Day last year, the US president, George Bush, announced that he’d issued instructions to allow “a more streamlined process” for the issuing of entry visas for people with HIV.
But new draft guidelines issued by the US government suggest that people with HIV will still have to obtain special permission to enter the country and will only be allowed to visit the US twice in any twelve-month period for visits of less than 30 days.
The draft guidelines still require people with HIV to visit a US embassy or consulate before their planned visit and to declare that they have HIV. For a visa to be issued, it’s also necessary for a person with HIV to be in good health, have enough medication for their proposed visit, and to understand the “nature, severity and communicability of HIV.”
This immediately eliminates anyone wanting to visit another country for medical treatment purposes.
But more than anything what it does is the exact opposite of normalizing the disease. By placing specific restrictions only for HIV countries like the USA are perpetuating the fear, discrimination and ignorance that experts have been trying so hard to dispel since two decades.
The restrictions violate the basic human rights of HIV infected people failing to recognize that they are individuals with legitimate needs like other people. A simple wish that a person might have of seeing the world could become a battleground for medico-legal issues due to such travel restrictions.
Moreover such a hypocritical attitude by USA is detrimental to the fight against AIDS and totally against the democratic image that Uncle Sam tries to project.
If this virus does not see any national or regional boundaries, why should we?
posted by The Red Ribbon @ 4:35 PM
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