Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1989. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
The Associated Press - Monday, December 25, 1989
Paul Raeburn, Associated Press
Dr. Jonathan Mann says many of the discriminatory laws put in place during the initial panic earlier in the '80s have been repealed as governments discovered the laws were impeding efforts to fight the disease's spread.
"We made a big discovery during the 1980s that ranks right up there with the discovery of the virus and the modes of spread," Mann said by telephone from Geneva. "And that discovery is that to fight this global epidemic of infectious disease, you must also fight against prejudice and discrimination."
Health officials have been successful in curbing risky sexual behavior among homosexual men in San Francisco and among female prostitutes in Nairobi, Kenya and Peru, among other places, Mann said.
"All of those programs have in common ... the careful attention to developing a supportive social environment that refuses discrimination against infected people," he said. "We've realized that in order to fight successfully against AIDS, it is vital to protect the rights and dignity of people."
Mann said that more than 35 countries, including the United States, passed laws in the 1980s restricting immigration by people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
Other countries, including the Soviet Union, South Korea and Iraq established mandatory screening for HIV infection. Some, including China, South Africa and Chile, passed laws that require the isolation of people infected with HIV, Mann said.
"In Cuba, when people were found to be infected, they were asked to leave their home and their job and go to a renovated hospital on the outskirts of Havana where they were given a salary but were basically 'kept,"' Mann said.
Such laws have crippled efforts to block the spread of AIDS, he said.
"If you knew that being tested for HIV infection could result in your having to leave your family, lose your job, and in every other way be separated from society, would you be tested?"
Mann noted that Illinois and Louisiana recently repealed laws requiring AIDS tests for couples seeking marriage licenses, concluding that the laws were ineffective and wasteful.
Costa Rica repealed a law requiring that foreign sailors display a certificate showing they were free of AIDS before they could come ashore.
"It sounds like good sense, superficially, to 'build a wall' around a country and say everybody who comes into this country has to be tested for HIV infection," Mann said. "Then you get into the realities."
In 1987, a group of experts convened by the World Health Organization concluded that HIV screening for international travelers "would at best -- and at great cost -- retard only briefly the dissemination of HIV both globally and with respect to any particular country."
"A virus, a disease, doesn't respect walls," Mann said. "As the Berlin Wall has shown, walls don't protect people; they actually endanger the people within the walls."
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