Tell all - fresh thoughts on disclosure
Editor Bob Leahy slams the current emphasis on non disclosure in the HIV community and says it's time to challenge stigma, reduce new infections and help end the epidemic by encouraging and aiding more people to disclose their status to the world
Author - Bob Leahy - Editor
10 January 2013
The need for talk.
In these times where the conversation is all about NON disclosure, I'm becoming increasingly a fan of the very opposite.
In short, I think many more people need to disclose
Here's the thing. It's unfashionable to say so, I know, but I think we should disclose, when we can do so safely, in
almost all sexual and non sexual situations where it makes sense. So the mailman doesn't need to know but our family needs to know,
our friends and our health care professionals too. And perhaps the world. Because there is a hell of a lot of merit in doing
so and very little in not doing so.
I'm tired of conversations with timid souls who worry whether they should tell their dentist or their hairdresser or
their (fill in the blank). I'm tired of men who won't tell their sex partners that they are positive before they fuck them without
a condom. (And if poz guys fucking strangers without a condom without disclosure sounds a bit wild here, remember that activity
is exactly what we've recently argued in the Supreme Court of Canada is perfectly OK, if we have an undetectable viral load.
We lost, by the way.)
What the research says.
Canadian Barry Adam's research on the impact of criminalization on people with HIV sheds some light too on whether people living with HIV
agree with neg people who think poz people should disclose. In fact 78% of Ontario Cohort Study (OCS) participants said that disclosure
is the right thing to happen, even if their viral load is undetectable. Said one heterosexual participant "I'm guided by my morals.
I don't want to put someone in danger." Another: "I had to come up with principles and ethics, a code of ethics for myself - and
that hasn't changed, given the public climate."
Read full article here
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Source: PositiveLite.com - Canada's Online HIV Magazine
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