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China Exclusive: Jailed with HIV -- a struggle against despair (7) |
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20:32, July 09, 2007 |
"The rehabilitation of an inmate will certainly suffer if he or she encounters discrimination, whether it is inside prison or outside," says Jing Jun, an HIV policy professor at Tsinghua University. "We need to carry on the campaign to fight discrimination both in prison and in the general public."
Wu Zunyou, a top HIV/AIDS prevention specialist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, says a lack of continuity of care and medical support will harm progress made in HIV/AIDS prevention in prison and might lead to new cases of transmission.
"People living with HIV/AIDS need regular counseling, or at least have somebody who cares about them and who they can talk to, " he says.
Huang Yiquan, head of Qingliu prison, says prejudice and ignorance about AIDS are so strong that he had to postpone an expansion plan for the prison ward for infected inmates.
"The present ward is almost full and badly need to be expanded to accommodate newcomers, but the problem is almost all the construction teams cried off the moment they were told HIV carriers once lived here," he says.
The rural construction workers probably thought the virus could continue to exist in the empty wards, even weeks after all the inmates had been moved out, Huang says with a wry smile.
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