Sunday Times, South Africa - Sunday, April 18, 1999
Laurice Taitz
Plans to make AIDS a notifiable disease were announced by Zuma on Friday after a two-day meeting of health ministers from the Southern African Development Community.
At a joint briefing with health ministers from Namibia and Zimbabwe, Zuma said: "We can't afford to be dictated to by human rights or AIDS activists. We need to do what is right. We want to know who is dying of AIDS, and relatives and partners must be notified. It is time we treated AIDS as a public health issue like TB. We don't go about treating that with secrecy."
Among the principles adopted by the ministers was that all AIDS-related deaths would in future be recorded by health authorities.
But Peter Busse, from the National Association of People Living with HIV/AIDS, said Zuma's proposal was "an outrageous suggestion".
"One can't argue that HIV/AIDS is the same as any other disease. With other diseases you are not denied employment, you are not evicted from your family home or killed for revealing you are infected," he said.
Busse said alternative methods of surveillance that should be used included analysing figures of HIV infection from antenatal clinics, insurance testing and blood donors.
"This approach is a radical departure from what Zuma has said up to now. It is an invasion of privacy that could be challenged constitutionally," he said
Jody Kollapen, a member of the Human Rights Commission, said: "We should not make these choices between human rights and public policy. Both make their own legitimate demands. This issue needs to be approached with extreme caution. One cannot ignore the prejudice and levels of discrimination directed at people who are HIV positive."
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