UNSW marks World AIDS Day

01 December 2005

World AIDS Day has been marked at UNSW with a seminar 'Reinventing Health - HIV and Globalisation'.

NewSouth Global Professor of Health and Human Rights, Professor Daniel Tarantola, who is a former senior advisor to the World Health Organisation, has criticised the trend of systematic HIV testing in developing countries.

"This is a short-sighted public health practice with counterproductive consequences," said Professor Tarantola. "It jeopardises the trust people put in the doctor and the system. People also need to be psychologically prepared for a result.

"This practice amounts to mandatory testing without the person's consent or knowledge. It makes routine testing become a curse, not a blessing," he said.

Deputy Director of the National Centre in HIV Social Research, Heather Worth, presented a paper entitled 'AIDS and Empire'.

She argued that global inequality is engendered, embodied and persists through HIV's integration in politics and international relations.

"The threat of HIV is seen to be its potential for global chaos through the breakdown of production; the decimation of reproductive members of society, though infrastructural decay and the destabilisation of individual states," said Dr Worth.

Ms Gillian Moon, Lecturer in the Faculty of Law and expert on the relationship between human rights law, development policy and the commercial sector also spoke at the seminar.

She discussed the future of Africa's access to new HIV-AIDS drugs, in the context of the World Trade Organisation's upcoming conference and commitments made by G8 leaders in Gleneagles this year.

The seminar was hosted by the School of Public Health and Community Medicine.