World News

Compiled by Martin Flynn

Move to overturn US HIV travel ban

A bipartisan group of senators is seeking to overturn the 1993 ban on HIV positive immigrants and visitors to the USA before President George Bush leaves the Oval office at the end of this year.

The three hopeful presidential candidates, Senator John McCain for the Republicans and Senators Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama for the Democrats, have all vowed to overturn the ban if elected.

Now a bipartisan group of US senators, led by Republican Senators Gordon Smith and Richard Luger and Democrat Senators John Kerry and Barrack Obama have laid an amendment to this year’s Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to overturn the ban.

Twelve other countries ban HIV positive visitors, both immigrants and non immigrants: Armenia, Brunei, Iraq, Libya, Moldova, Oman, Qatar, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Sudan.
Even China recently acted to remove its bar on HIV positive visitors because it feared embarrassment ahead of this summer’s Olympic Games.

But the US, which has been the most generous in funding HIV research and donating money to developing countries, still discriminates against those with HIV.

The ban was the brainchild of rabid right wing Senator Jesse Helms in the early 1990s and even the older President Bush unsuccessfully attempted tried to prevent the ban becoming law.

And for all his fine rhetoric, President Bill Clinton failed to overturn the 1993 legislation despite two terms in office.

International conferences on HIV and AIDS have avoided meeting in the US for 15 years because of the ban, whilst flouts UN declarations on human rights.

And the ban has been an embarrassment for several thousand top HIV doctors and researchers in the USA.

In practical terms the ban was largely unenforceable, it is impossible to test all visitors for HIV.

Many have ignored or flouted the law and some HIV positive visitors who travel with their drugs have been deported.

Others have sent on their HIV drugs in advance of visiting the US whilst other visitors have stopped taking their drugs whilst in the US, with the inevitable result of viral rebound and HIV disease progression.

“Making HIV the only medical condition that legally prevents someone from immigrating or even visiting is a signal to people with HIV that they have something to be ashamed of,” openly HIV writer Andrew Sullivan, himself a victim of the ban, wrote in the Washington Post.

“All we ask is to be able to visit, live and work in America and, for some of us, to realise our dream of becoming Americans –
whether we are HIV positive or not,” Sullivan added.

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