Miss. Ends HIV Prisoner Segregation

The Mississippi Department of Corrections has agreed to stop segregating prisoners with HIV, ending a practice that ostracized inmates and prevented them from accessing resources available to other prisoners. According to a joint news release from the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, which advocated for the change, corrections commissioner Christopher Epps made the decision.

The move leaves Alabama and South Carolina as the only states that continue to segregate prisoners with HIV, a practice more common during the early days of the HIV epidemic. “Public and correctional health experts agree that there is no medical basis for segregating HIV-positive prisoners within correctional facilities or for limiting access to jobs, vocational training and educational programs available to others,” said the news release on Wednesday.

“Since 1987, however, MDOC has performed mandatory HIV tests on all prisoners entering the state prison system, and has permanently housed all male prisoners who test positive in a segregated unit at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, the state’s highest security prison. As a result, prisoners with HIV have been faced with unjustified isolation, exclusion and marginalization, and low-custody prisoners have been forced unnecessarily to serve their sentences in more violent, more expensive prisons.”

As you know, Familyblendz maintains a vigil on equality for all people, bound or free. My goal is to prevent anyone from having to place themselves in positions whereby others can further segregate them, malign them or worse, treat them unfairly.

The change means that HIV positive prisoners now can participate in training programs and jobs like kitchen work, and avoid public disclosure of HIV status that results from being housed in a separate unit. A desegregation policy will be phased in for prisoners currently in the separate HIV unit, and new prisoners will be incorporated into the general population immediately.

We at Familyblendz enjoy bringing you stories like this one. It screams of hope and optimism that comes through research, activism and funding. Following a stem transplant from a donor carring a gene mutuation that provides natural resistance to HIV a 42 year old man who has leukaemia now appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood.

A report on the stem cell transplant in the New England Journal of Medicine says that since it has occurred the patient has not tested positive for HIV, with the Dr. Gero Hutter of Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin in Germany confirming:

“Today, two years after his transplantation, he is still without any signs of HIV disease and without antiretroviral medication.”

Performed in Germany on an American, the transplant was performed not to treat the HIV, but the man’s leukemia, however they did deliberately chose the donor with the naturally occurring gene mutation that confers resistance to HIV. Causing the resistance via a mutation (CCR5 delta32) which cripples the CCR5 receptor on the surface of T cells, that is normally attacked by HIV, this is a mutuation found only in 1 percent to 3 percent of white populations of European descent. Some people only have one copy of CCR5 delta32 which results in them taking longer to get sick or develop AIDS if infected with HIV. If they however have two (a copy from each parent) then they may not become infected at all.

The patient in this case was given a transplant with two copies of CCR5 delta32 and whilst his findings are very promising, the reality according to Dr. Jay Levy, a professor at the University of California San Francisco, is that it won’t help the majority as the treatment is too extreme to be used as a routine treatment. He also believes that the transplant won’t have completely cured the patient as it is likely the HIV may infect other cells and resurface at a later time. Although this may be true, it is important to note that the patient was also found to be infected with low levels of a type of HIV known as X4 that does not require the CCR5 receptor before the surgery , but these have shown no sign of developing.

Admitting they had no real explanation for what has happened, Hutter said the “… finding is very surprising.”, however he has agreed with other researchers that it shouldn’t be used to treat HIV alone, with Levy suggesting “A more logical — and potentially safer — approach would be to develop some type of CCR5-disabling gene therapy or treatment that could be directly injected into the body”.

We pass this stuff on to you all to further help you understand the real fight. Its not in talking or even blogging, solely, yet, Familyblendz and other organizations like ours are better equipped to address the real concerns and fears of the masses by keeping only the relevant information in the mainstream.

At the end of the day, whether this patient shows signs of HIV resurfacing today or next year, unless you are currently living with this infection, none of us may ever truly know the benefit he has gained TODAY alone just by knowing that as of right now...there is no detection. Lets support or brothers and sisters who are out there on the frontlines keeping us current.

Sincerely,

Family

Honduras Leadership Needs to act to prevent further HIV Murders...

The killing of an HIV/AIDS outreach worker on December 14, 2009, is part of a pattern of violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Honduras that seems to have accelerated in the turbulent months since the June 28 coup, Human Rights Watch said today.

The organization called on Honduran judicial authorities to open full investigations of all the reported killings, and to provide human rights training for the police and the judiciary about sexual orientation and gender identity.

"The mounting violence against people who look or love differently in Honduras reflects a crisis of intolerance," said Juliana Cano Nieto, researcher in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch.

The latest attack was on Walter Orlando Trochez, 27, who had been active both in the LGBT movement and in political activity opposing the coup. He was shot in the chest by an unidentified person late on the night of December 14 in downtown Tegucigalpa, near the Central Church.

Indyra Mendoza of Cattrachas, a local lesbian organization, told Human Rights Watch that he managed to call his friends on his mobile phone after the shooting. When they arrived at the scene, an ambulance was taking Trochez to Hospital Escuela, where he died. An autopsy revealed that he died from one shot to the chest.

On December 5, Trochez reported to the Attorney General's Office that four armed men in civilian clothes attempted to kidnap him on the previous day. He said there had been a series of threats against his life on the grounds of his participation in the resistance movement.

"Walter used to go with me to recognize the bodies of our transgender friends when they were killed," Mendoza said. "Now I had to go on my own to identify his body."

Since June 28, the National Criminal Investigation Department in Tegucigalpa has documented at least seven killings of transgender and gay people in Honduras, including Trochez. Local LGBT advocates have asked the prosecutor's office for information about approximately nine more reported killings in the second largest city - San Pedro Sula and neighboring cities.

In "Not Worth a Penny: Human Rights Abuses against Transgender People in Honduras", a report released in May, Human Rights Watch documented the killing of 17 transgender women between 2005 and 2008.

In the report, Human Rights Watch called on Honduran authorities to:

•Repeal provisions of the Law on Police and Social Affairs that penalize public conduct on arbitrary and vaguely defined grounds. Authorities should send a clear message to all law enforcement institutions that violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, will not be tolerated, the report said;
•Conduct independent, impartial, and effective investigations into the general phenomenon of homophobic and transphobic violence and into specific allegations of police brutality, extortion, and ill-treatment against LGBT people, leading to the identification and prosecution of the perpetrators;
•Enact legislation that provides specific protections on the grounds of sexual orientation, and gender identity and gender expression.

How the world views the HIV/AIDS epidemic is in some cases a stark difference to how we view it here in the states. I just read an article and posted a message on http://www.twitter.com/familyblendz about how Kenya is looking to provide resources to gays for the Census. Problem with that in Africa is, there is punishable jail time that accompanies your admission of being gay. Well who do you think will come forward to get "education" on HIV/AIDS prevention if they think they get thrown in jail? So I clearly question the motives of the Kenyan government and precisely what it expects to gain from such fruitless efforts.

Well that leads us to Russia who also made the news in their awareness of this epidemic spreading. The truth is Russia has no awareness plans because they have only subscribed to the failed "abstinence" strategy. They have come to realize that ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away.

AIDS specialists urged Russia to adopt successful strategies like needle-exchange programs and heroin substitutes such as methadone for drug addicts.

The number of HIV infections in Russia has doubled in the past eight years and there is evidence that in this region the virus is increasingly being spread by heterosexual sex.

The rapid growth of the epidemic in Russia is in contrast to sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia, where prevalence of the virus fell during the same eight-year period, according to UNAIDS, the United Nations AIDS agency. So while other nations were addressing the issues and meeting them head to reduce their numbers and deaths, Russia has climbed to double digits.

Russia’s chief public health officer, Gennady Onishchenko, told a regional AIDS conference Wednesday that Russia is "emphatically against" the use of drug replacement therapy. Meanwhile, he criticized programs that exchange clean needles for used ones, saying such programs may promote illicit drug sales and HIV transmission.

Both are part of a so-called harm reduction strategy, in contrast to the just-say-no programs that urge abstinence from drugs and risky sex. Russian health officials say they are committed overall to a "healthy lifestyles" rather than a harm reduction approach to improving public health.

That isn’t good enough, a number of foreign experts say.

"International studies show that an abstinence-based message on drug use or sex simply doesn’t work," said Robin Gorna, executive director of the International AIDS Society. In Russia, she said, "it does appear that ideology is getting in the way of public health care policy."

Russia has increased spending on AIDS programs by 33 times since 2006, making it a central part of an ambitious new national health care strategy. It has expanded drug treatment dramatically for AIDS sufferers and is among the leaders worldwide in reducing the incidence of transmission of the disease between mothers and their babies.

But many Russian officials view harm reduction efforts as encouraging criminal or shameful behavior. The position has left it increasingly isolated, as China recently embraced such programs, foreign AIDS experts here said.

Russia has some highly successful needle exchange programs and free condom programs, several foreign specialists said, but many have been paid for through grants from the international Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria.

Now those grants are being terminated under Global Fund rules, the specialists said, because Russia is too wealthy to qualify for them.

Chris Beyrer, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, said Russian officials "have never really embraced" needle exchange, free condom distribution and other harm reduction techniques.

"It is the reason I think that they continue to have one of the most severe epidemics in the region," said Beyrer, director of Hopkins’ AIDS International Training and Research Program. He was in Moscow for the regional meeting, which runs through Friday.

AIDS was virtually unknown in Russia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union prior to the collapse of Communism. What started as an epidemic among male injection drug users here in the late 1990s has gradually moved into the communities of sex workers. By 2007 about 44 percent of new infections in Russia were among women, according to UNAIDS, raising fears it could move into the general population.

Onishchenko blamed the increase in HIV infections to the surge in Afghan poppy production over the past decade, a trend that has flooded the former Soviet Union with heroin. Amazing, Russia is now blaming Afghanistan!

People living in the region are routinely asked to provide health certificates that reveal their HIV status, the report found. Hospital workers often casually identify HIV-positive patients to bystanders and co-workers, U.N. researchers said, and hospitals frequently segregate HIV-positive patients, treat them with scorn or charge them extra, hidden fees.

HIV-positive children face discrimination at school, including forced disclosure of their status and segregation from other students, while in the labor sector, many employers are wary of hiring HIV-positive individuals.

AIDS activists say that discrimination drives many of those infected to avoid testing and treatment. This is the real problem, the lack of equality and freedom from discrimination prevents education.

*This article, originally posted by the Association Press was amended by Familyblendz for this blog posting.