Nasser Al Mazrouei's story is heartbreaking. As The National reported yesterday, the 34-year-old Emirati has been living with HIV for 16 years – and since his diagnosis, he has been held in a government facility. He is not allowed out of confinement without a chaperone and he was forced to attend his father's funeral in handcuffs. His supervisors believe he should be released, but his family has refused to give its consent.
It is a tragedy that there remains so much ignorance about HIV and Aids. To be sure, it remains a global public-health threat. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Aids has claimed about 39 million lives worldwide since the epidemic began, including 1.5 million who died of Aids-related illnesses in 2013. But enormous progress has been made in preventing HIV developing into Aids, and the number of cases in the UAE is small, partly because of the compulsory testing of expatriates as part of the visa application and renewal process.
People with HIV pose virtually no threat to the general community. As the late Diana, Princess of Wales so poignantly demonstrated back in 1987, when she sat on the sickbed of a man with Aids and held his hand, patients cannot pass on their condition through casual contact. HIV-infected people – especially those in developed countries – have a brighter prognosis thanks to "drug cocktails" that can extend their life expectancy by decades. But this does not provide consolation to those people who have been ostracised from society because they are living with HIV. Another infected man, AA, told this newspaper that he just wants to live a normal life, but he has no chance of finding a wife and having children. He has, quite reasonably, asked for a matchmaking service for people with HIV.
HIV can be acquired in several ways – including sexual contact, but also through blood transfusions, as in AA’s case, and the sharing of hypodermic needles. It is not for the rest of us to speculate as to how an infected person acquired the virus or to pass moral judgment on them. It is our role as individuals and a community to show compassion and understanding, and to educate ourselves and others about HIV. It is not acceptable for people with this illness to be shut away from their own community. Moreover, if ignorance is allowed to thrive, then more people will be at risk of infection.
