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- Tuesday, 9 June 2009
The NSW Government has been told it must do more to reduce the stigma and discrimination around HIV in the final 18 months of its state HIV strategy.
During a two-day forum last month, HIV organisations told NSW Health that people with HIV are fearful of the effects of criminalisation of transmission on their lives.
Despite the current legal requirements to do so, people with HIV in NSW are more anxious around disclosure now than they were five years ago, Positive Life president Jason Appleby told the forum.
He said the full impact of the phenomenon was yet to be understood, but the cost of realigning public health responses to the new legal, police and media contexts has been immense.
Perhaps one of the biggest -˜missed opportunities’ over the last three years is a greater coordinated emphasis on including messages which address HIV-related stigma and discrimination in everything we do.
NSW Health has been conducting a mid-term review of the state’s HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C and STIs strategy for 2006-2010 since January.
Last week the department released five broad priorities for the final 18 months of the strategy that remained relatively unchanged from its early intentions. It will reinvigorate gay men’s HIV prevention, work to reduce HIV stigma, and identify opportunities to enhance relationships and partnerships with mainstream health services for people with HIV.
Developments since the strategy was first drafted that will become a late priority include better support for those who have HIV and a secondary problem like mental illness or drug abuse.
Online social media and other new technologies will also be investigated as means of improving HIV prevention campaigns.
NSW Health is considering the outcomes of the review process.
Tags: criminalisation, hiv, HIV strategy, Jason Appleby, NSW Health, Positive Life, stigma, STIs
June 11th, 2009 @ 9:07 pm
“people with HIV in NSW are more anxious around disclosure now than they were five years ago”. No wonder. It’s been 5 years since the marriage ban wrote extra discrimination into law against gays for the 21st century, and 5 years since Carmel Tebbut stamped out & removed anti homophobia training in schools as part of a high profile attack on gays by News Ltd on the front pages of the notoriously homophobic Daily Telegraph which apparently dictates when NSW politicians should jump & how high when it comes to gay issues.
Our society is more conservative, with “moral police” like the Daily Telegraph ruling our lives whether we like it or not. They will run a negative story on gays, or chase Ian Thorpe’s every move, but any positive role models are censored out of sight. It all has an effect, that has built up over time.