Not something to be proud of.

BBC: NZ legal first on HIV disclosure

New Zealand has claimed a lot of World First title, the most famous of which being that it was the first country to give women voting rights. It is also (I think) the first country in Asia-Pacific to allow same-sex civil unions. But being that first country in the world to encourage HIV-positive people to hide that fact prior to sex - well, that's just nothing to be proud of.

For those of you unclear on this: AIDS is a serious disease, and there are solid scientific evidences to suggest that HIV leads to AIDS in the vast majority of cases. In recent years, with the advancements in therapy, drugs, and (possible) vaccines, people seem to start considering AIDS as some kind of allergy - inconvenient, but controllable. Recent there's even an semi-scientific clinical study that suggested that HIV is weakening. I have nothing against researching physicians, but there's a reason why Nature and Science don't EVER publish any clinical studies - they're sort of scientific, but never quite there. Pretty much all the articles in medical journals work under one assumption: in the population involved in the study. And no matter how big your research grant is or how many patients are involved, a clinial study is unlike to cover even 1% of the potential patients. Most important of all, clinical studies report what they see - they usually don't investigate the underlying mechanisms or causes in a scientific manner. Unfortunately most people don't know about this, so they consider clinical studies to be of equal value as proper scientific studies, which often then lead to stupid health guidelines and policies being made.

But I digress.

HIV is a serious and potentially deadly virus, but there are some people who wants to downplay this fact - those who have it. They do that for good reasons, too. HIV-positive people are often unnecessarily discriminated at work, school, and other benigh environments. In those cases, revealing their condition do much more harm than good. There are exceptions, of course, people who have close contact with other people, e.g. nurses. But there are cases where HIV-positive patients should be required to reveal their conditions, like when they go to a dentist, and, obviously, when donating any kind of body fluid.

Sex should be one of those conditions.

The reason behind the judge's ruling in the Dalley cases was that he wore condom during the intercourse. Any respected physician - neh, anyone other than hopeless optimistists and condom makers, will tell you that condoms are not 100% effective, even when used properly. In real life, condoms have a 93% success rate at preventing conceiving. That's at preventing something (sperm) 5 orders of magnitude larger than the HIV for coming in contact with another person's body.

Moreover, the judge said, and I quote: "The evidence of health experts in the area is that the use of a condom for vaginal intercourse is sufficient for the prevention of the transmission of HIV and that this can be met without the requirement for disclosure,". So does that mean anal or oral sex are completely safe from possible HIV transmisson? Again, anyone who didn't sleep through their highschool sex-ed would tell you that's not true.

I welcome any changes to make our society a fairer and more open one, but one like this that potentially endangers any sexually-active members of the society, should be made with carefully considerations.