Gay AIDS organisations, which emerged spontaneously within Australia’s gay communities in order to educate their members about AIDS prevention and care for the sick, also asked for funding and to be a part of the policy-making process. In addition, they asked for funds to be channelled into research institutions and clinical facilities in the hope that a cure for AIDS might be found and widespread HIV antibody testing programs implemented. Advocates of this ‘traditional’ approach to the control of infectious disease also called on the government to close gay bathhouses and other venues where disease might be spread. An even greater number supported mandatory testing of ‘high risk’ groups, such as gay men, injecting drug users and sex workers. Opinion polls in 19 suggested that 25 per cent and 50 per cent of the population favoured the quarantine of infected individuals and universal screening of the entire population for HIV antibodies respectively. Given the hostility towards homosexuals, and the public’s fear of those afflicted by HIV, it seemed likely that Australian governments would be persuaded to enact a range of coercive public health measures in an effort to contain the spread of AIDS. No-one was laughing, however, when three-year-old Eve van Grafhorst was prohibited from attending pre-school in July 1985 after parents, fearing contagion, threatened to withdraw their children from her class. A spokesman wryly noted that if anyone managed to have mid-flight sex with an HIV-positive passenger-one of the few ways of transmitting the virus-they should be given ‘points for enterprise’. The Australian Flight Attendants’ Association re-jected the bans. (This caused one commentator to ponder which part of the policeman’s apparatus the subject was required to blow.) Seven months later, Ansett and TAA airlines banned HIV-positive individuals from travelling on their planes as a means of protecting their staff.
In November 1984, New South Wales police called for a halt on random breath testing, and then insisted on being issued with plastic gloves, because they believed that HIV could be transmitted via the saliva of motorists. Such responses continued even after the viral origin of AIDS had been established. News that three Queensland babies had died from AIDS as a result of receiving HIV-contaminated blood donated by a homosexual prompted a gang of men to roam Sydney’s gay strip looking for poofters to punish.
Sydney Telecom engineers refused to carry out repairs at the Pitt Street mail exchange because, they claimed, it was staffed by a large number of homosexual telephone operators ‘who probably had AIDS’. A Sydney dentist banned homosexual patients from his surgery, and numerous gay men were evicted from their homes or denied accommodation. The public’s anxiety about AIDS soon manifested in discrimination against homosexuals. Even doctors lent support to the opinion that gays were responsible for exposing Australians to a malicious new killer. The public was left in no doubt about who was harbouring the fugitive, as media reports emphasised that all of the cases involved homosexual males and that this group in the US was in the middle of an epidemic. The early news reports of these cases were announced in a tone that bordered on hysteria. The case was reported six months later in the Medical Journal of Australia, by which time the first Australian had been diagnosed with AIDS. His patient was a 27-year-old New York City resident visiting Sydney. The first case of AIDS in Australia was diagnosed by Professor Ronald Penny, an immunologist at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital, in November 1982. Australia’s response represents a success story oneįrequently cited by the World Health Organisation as a model for other countries. Due to Australia’s pragmatic and innovative response, the rate of new HIV infections fell from approximately 2500 per year in the mid-1980s to less than 500 per year within a decade. In 1987, the Grim Reaper advertisements announced that 50,000 Australians might already be infected and this figure would continue to rise. When the first case of AIDS was reported in Australia 20 years ago, health experts braced themselves for a morbidity rate to rival World War II.
0 kommentar(er)
