Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia, Inc.;
Sara el-Khalili

He was kicked out of his house by his brothers and lost his job as a janitor at a Cairo hotel.

"My mother and I have nowhere to stay...we live in the streets after my brothers kicked me out of the house when they found I had AIDS," said the man, exhausted and ill as he sat at a Cairo hospital waiting for his regular treatments.

Like other AIDS patients in Egypt, he declined to be named for fear of being ostracised by a mostly conservative society where strict cultural taboos frown on premarital sex.

"My own family is scared of me," said the man, his eyes bloodshot and skin a sickly yellow. He said he has difficulty walking. "When I walk from here to the door I get exhausted."

Health officials in the mainly-Moslem country say they have made progress in breaking the social stigma of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) but still have a long way to go.

"We protect them (AIDS patients) from society, because AIDS carries a stigma with it," said Dr Al-Said Aoun, the health ministry's under-secretary of preventive affairs.

Since 1986, 655 of Egypt's more than 60 million people have been diagnosed with HIV and 360 of them have died.

While the number of cases is not described as epidemic, the Health Ministry and the World Health Organisation (WHO) still fear numbers may grow.

Among the problems is a strong social barrier to talking openly about sexual transmission of the virus which causes AIDS.

Aoun said many Egyptians tend to think AIDS patients are sexually deviant. "We give AIDS patients and their families counselling," he said.

AIDS EDUCATION COUCHED IN RELIGION

The virus which causes AIDS is spread most commonly by sexual contact with an infected partner. It is also spread through contact with infected blood.

A Health Ministry report recognised that AIDS was a public health threat in Egypt because of aggravating local factors.

These include the high prevalence of populations with blood and renal disorders who need multiple transfusions. Egypt is also an important tourist, academic and economic centre in the Middle East, it noted.

Health officials said they are taking preventive measures.

Blood is screened thoroughly and only disposable syringes are used. Condoms are available in pharmacies.

Educating people against the risk of sexual transmission is more difficult.

The manager of Egypt's National AIDS Control Programme, Dr Nasr El-Sayyed, said that most of the education about sexual transmission of HIV is conveyed through religion.

"The Islamic religion is the official religion. All youth awareness has to be through this frame," he said.

The Health Ministry urges people in its AIDS awareness booklet "A Message to Youth" to abstain from sex outside marriage.

"If you want to be safe...Don't have sex before marriage and don't have sex outside marriage," it says.

To make access to AIDS information easier, a hot-line was established in 1996 to give counselling and support.

"Egyptians are not aware enough of the seriousness of such a disease. They think they are far away from it," said psychiatrist Adel Sadek. "Religion is most effective with Egyptians because we're a religious society."

EGYPT'S AIDS PATIENTS OSTRACISED

Mohammad al-Khawashky, WHO representative in Egypt, said the country was considered a "risky zone" even though the number of cases was not epidemic. "AIDS is a taboo not only in Egypt, it is a taboo almost everywhere," he said.

Those words rang true for a 20-year-old haemophiliac student who got the virus through a blood transfusion 11 years ago.

He said his classmates teased him by telling jokes about AIDS when they found about his infection through a fellow student, whose father works in a local health unit.

Their teacher told the students it was impossible for him to have AIDS because patients die after a few months.

"I'm upset because they don't know that I'm a victim and contracted the disease through blood transfusion, not through drugs or illegitimate sexual relations," the student said.

He said he could not tell residents in his town about his infection. "If they knew, they would be scared of me and give me weird looks."

Sayyed says there has been a change of attitude in Egyptian society's acceptance of people with AIDS or HIV.

One patient wrote in the health ministry's AIDS awareness bulletin of the isolation that the disease has brought him.

"When you die, you find someone to mourn you. But when you get infected with the AIDS virus, even the closest person runs away."
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