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"Your husband has HIV"
The
Star (www.thestar.com.my)
(07/12/05)
FORTY-THREE women here had no idea their husbands were HIV-positive until
Health Ministry officers showed up at their home with a letter.
Instead of hearing about it from their spouses, they read about it in the
letter. The hand-delivered note told them about the counselling available at
the Communicable Diseases Centre and advised them to get tested for the
virus that causes AIDS.
Two of the women have since been found to be infected.
Two have also since divorced their husbands.
Married HIV patients are encouraged to tell their spouses, and the majority
do so, the ministry said on Monday. But when they refuse, health officers
will deliver the letters by hand to their partners.
The ministry began tracing and informing the wives in July this year, after
doing away with an old rule that required infected patients' consent before
their spouses were informed.
That change was made as part of a renewed effort to fight AIDS, which
includes the introduction of routine antenatal screening of pregnant women
and the formation of the AIDS Business Alliance to raise awareness of AIDS
in the workplace.
Senior Minister of State for Health Balaji Sadasivan gave an update on these
new measures on Monday at a forum on AIDS trends in South-East Asia held by
the Institute of South-East Asian Studies.
From January to October this year, 198 people were diagnosed with HIV. Less
than 10% were women.
Dr Balaji said: “Marriage and the women’s own fidelity are not enough to
protect them against HIV infection.”
About one in 25 gay men in Singapore is HIV-positive, said Dr Balaji.
Researchers came to that conclusion based on the data gleaned from the
anonymous HIV testing clinic at Kelantan Lane.
However, the minister pointed out that the data used to come up with the
figure was far from perfect.
“Is this representative of all gays? Or is it representative of a sample of
gays?
“We can’t answer this question unless we do more detailed studies which may
invade people’s privacy,” he said.
Action for Aids, a non-governmental organisation which runs the anonymous
testing clinic, has no idea whether the figure cited by Dr Balaji was
accurate.
Its programme manager Abdul Hamid Hassan said the figure could just as
likely be an overestimate, or an underestimate. — The Straits Times/ Asia
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