Word: hiv
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Several years ago in the town of Merauke, on the southern coast of Papua province in Indonesia, a young woman was diagnosed with HIV. Upon learning that she had been infected by her boyfriend, according to a local doctor, the woman decided to take "revenge." She began sleeping with as many men as possible, asking only for a copy of her partner's identity card. Shortly before she died, she told her family to look under her pillow, where they found 50 photocopies - evidence of her self-proclaimed campaign to infect as many men as possible before dying...
...Years later, that disturbing case is having some equally unsettling repercussions in Papua. Dr. John Manangsang, who admits the case was an extreme one, has drafted a new bill that would legalize implanting microchips into HIV-infected people deemed to be purposefully infecting others with the life-threatening virus. "The chip would work similar to the chips they use to track birds and animals considered endangered species," explains the doctor, who also sits in the local parliament and proposed legislation to pass the human microchipping. "I don't expect many would be tagged, but after coming across so many HIV...
...Papua does have a major problem on its hands: the province's HIV infection rate is 15 times higher than the national average. Not good news in a country with Asia's highest growing HIV-infection rate, but not everyone thinks microchipping is the way to improve the situation. The proposed bill, now with the provincial parliament, has encountered fierce resistance from local health workers, government officials and church leaders, who say the practice would constitute a human rights violation and do little to address Papua's high infection rate. "Two wrongs do not make a right, and the plan...
...explains Agus Sumule, an adviser to the governor of Papua. "When we are, we will try to kill it." Sumule said the governor, Barnabas Suebu, would not be likely to sign the legislation. "The parliament is very worried and wants to take radical measures to curb the spread of HIV," says Matias Refra, the governor's spokesman. "We also agree there is an urgent need for action, but believe more [education] would be more effective...
...local parliaments that local governments simply don't enforce.) "We have the power to make the laws and we need one to protect healthy people as much as we do the rights of those infected," says Manansang, who has only come across one case of "aggressive" behavior in HIV patients over the course of his 14 years working as a general practitioner at a hospital near Papua's capital. "When people find out they are infected they often get depressed but others undergo a severe change in behavior and get angry. It is only those people we are trying...