UN call to ease Aids policy

James Reinl and Jeffrey Todd

• Last Updated: July 21. 2008 12:31AM UAE / July 20. 2008 8:31PM GMT

ABU DHABI/UN // The UN has urged the UAE and other Gulf nations to stop discriminating against people infected with HIV/Aids, proposing a code of practice for governments in dealing with migrant workers who become infected.

The call from the world body came as researchers at UAE University revealed that young people in the country have “alarming” knowledge gaps about the virus and a widespread “fear and intolerance” of those infected with it.

Khawla Mattar, an employment rights specialist for the International Labour Organisation (ILO), a UN agency, said the new guidelines encouraged UAE officials to abandon the practice of automatically deporting expatriates with HIV/Aids.

“There is clear discrimination against HIV-positive workers, so what we would like to ensure is that they are not deported,” said Ms Mattar. “If they can function in their job, then they should not be sent back [to their countries of origin] because it is a clear violation of their rights according to all the international standards and conventions.”

Current UAE law requires that all migrants arriving in the country undergo HIV/Aids testing before their residency visas are issued. Those who test positive are deported.

Anyone planning to marry, undergo surgery at a government hospital, start a new job or suffers from tuberculosis must be tested for the disease. Those infected are reported to the police.

The UN policy draft, a four-page document called HIV and International Labour Migration, jointly published by the ILO, UNAids and the International Organisation for Migration, puts added pressure on governments in the region to shift their positions. It calls on officials to “ensure there is no discrimination on the grounds of HIV status in the context of entry requirements, immigration, employment or reintegration procedures”. It also urges health chiefs to ensure “labour migrants and their families have the same access as nationals to gender-, language- and culture-sensitive HIV services”.

The Ministry of Health says about 700 Emiratis currently suffer from HIV/Aids, and 38 new cases have been reported recently. Officials claim that deporting infected migrants has curtailed the spread of the disease.

Last month, Humaid Mohammed al Qutami, the Minister of Health, said the policy of deporting infected migrants was “under review” while officials assessed whether the action constituted a rights violation. No announcement has been made since and the relevant officials were not available for comment yesterday.

Yet perceptions of the disease may prove far harder to change.

Medical researchers at UAE university, who surveyed hundreds of first-year students, most of them Emiratis, found that more than half believed HIV/Aids could be spread through infected food; 62 per cent said it could be spread by sharing a comb or brush and 91 per cent through a mosquito bite. Only one-third understood there was no cure.

“Alarming gaps in knowledge about transmission and curability put young Arabs at risk of contracting HIV,” said the study, the first phase of which was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Adolescent Health. It added that “fear and intolerant attitudes towards [people living with HIV] were prevalent”.

Ms Mattar, meanwhile, said Gulf nations shared a “black list” of named HIV/Aids deportees that ensured infected individuals were “never recruited in any of the GCC countries again”.

“This is a pretty serious problem,” Dr Peter Barss, an associate professor of community health at UAE University, said. “They believe it can be transmitted through casual contact, which means they would likely have an undue fear.”

More than half of the students believed individuals with HIV/Aids should live apart from the rest of society; 73 per cent thought children with the disease should not be allowed to attend school. Nearly every student surveyed felt all people entering the UAE should be tested for HIV.

“Of course they are going to take a strong line. I can only assume the students were not receiving valid information,” Dr Barss said.

The majority of students surveyed wanted more information about how to protect themselves from HIV/Aids. “People need to understand it,” said Dr Barss. “If you bring in new legislation, you need to know what people actually believe.”

* The National