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AIDS-Related Legislation in the Context of the Third AIDS Pandemic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2021

D. C. Jayasuriya
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Extract

The first AIDS-related legislation was enacted in 1983. By this time, policy-makers as well as legislators in several countries had set in motion the process of formulating legislative measures to deal with a new and critical problem about which very little was known. This process gathered momentum over the years, partly as a response to the recognition that the problem of discrimination against AIDS patients and persons with HIV infection, which first began with homosexuals and persons of Haitian and African origin, will assume more critical dimensions with devastating social, economic, political and cultural implications and reactions. It is these implications and reactions which have come to be described as the “Third AIDS Pandemic:”

The third epidemic closely follows the first two, of HIV infection and AIDS. It is the epidemic of economic, social, political and cultural reaction. In the words of Javier Perez de Cuellar,… “AIDS raises crucial social, humanitarian, and legal issues threatening to undermine the fabric of tolerance and understanding upon which our societies function.”

Type
Article
Information
Law, Medicine and Healthcare , Volume 18 , Issue 1-2 , Summer 1990 , pp. 41 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics

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References

Regulations No. 6 or 8 March 1983 of the National Board of Health and Welfare concerning notification of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Other countries which adopted legislative or quasi-legislative measures in the same year are Canada (Ontario); Denmark; Federal Republic of Germany; France; Greece; Israel; Italy; New Zealand; and the United States. Selected legislative texts on AIDS have been reproduced in World Health Organization, Legislative Responses to AIDS (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1989). For a comparative survey of AIDS-related legislation, see Jayasuriya, D.C., AIDS: Public Health and Legal Dimensions (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1988). As for AIDS-related laws in national jurisdictions, most researchers have focused on the situation in the United States. See, for instance, Gostin, L. and Ziegler, A., “A Review of AIDS-related Legislative and Regulatory Policy in the United States,” Law, Medicine and Health Care, 15(1–2) (1987): 5–16.Google Scholar
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