Human rights abuse in the name of public health: HIV, ethics and Egypt via Global bioethics blog
In the industrialized nations of the north, it is easy to take for granted the progress made in the control of the HIV virus, and some of the hard-fought, positive changes in the social, ethical and legal treatment of people living with HIV/AIDS. In the United States, regimes of increasingly effective drugs have been developed to control the virus and transform HIV/AIDS from a death sentence into a chronic disease; legal protections specific to persons with HIV/AIDS have been bolstered; social stigma, while by no means absent, has had some of its sharper corners blunted by therapeutic advances and improved public understanding of the modes of HIV transmission. The fact that this is not the case globally was driven home by a recent report by Human Rights Watch. In Egypt, an HIV positive...