The stigma attached to HIV/AIDS is still strong in most parts of the world, and this can have a greater debilitation effect on people who are HIV positive than their medical condition does. In a general way, I already touched on this in the blog that I wrote for World AIDS Day last December (you can find it HERE). Today I want to shine a spotlight on the way people with HIV are still discriminated against even by medical doctors, who really should know better.
The knowledge that it can be very hard for children (and adults) with HIV to find a doctor willing to treat them is not new to me. It is something I have been confronted with regularly over the past 9 years. However, it was recently brought home to me again, as a UK paediatrician visiting India shared her frustration with me at being unable to persuade Indian colleagues to provide tests or treatment to children with HIV who were clearly in desperate need of them, because they would involve bodily fluids.
Somehow, the attempts to prevent the spread of HIV have created such a culture of fear round it, which in turn has been whipped into hysteria, that people’s lives are now lost because of it. These lives are not lost because of HIV, but because of the fear of HIV. Lives are lost because biopsies, surgeries, drainage of wounds are not done for fear of infection. Even though a doctor would have to be extraordinarily incompetent to be able to manage to introduce the blood, pus or other bodily fluids that contain HIV into their own blood stream, while performing the necessary procedures.
A global awareness-raising campaign has to be undertaken, on a similar scale as the campaign to prevent infection – in fact, it would be useful to incorporate it into the campaign to prevent infection – to remind people to take sensible precautions, but not get lost in the panic.
This is essential because right now people’s reaction to HIV is far more devastating than the disease itself: people are ostracised from their community, not allowed to earn their own living, children end up separated from their families and both children and adults die because health care professionals refuse to give them basic medical care. This has to stop and we all need to play a role in it.
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