Obama Lifts AIDS Travel Ban
Source: Global Health Council, News

President Obama announced today that his administration is lifting travel restrictions into the country for those with HIV/AIDS.

"Twenty-two years ago, in a decision rooted in fear rather than fact, the United States instituted a travel ban on entry into the country for people living with HIV/AIDS. Now, we talk about reducing the stigma of this disease -- yet we've treated a visitor living with it as a threat. We lead the world when it comes to helping stem the AIDS pandemic -- yet we are one of only a dozen countries that still bar people from HIV from entering our own country," Obama declared, before signing a bill extending the HIV/AIDS treatment act named for Ryan White, who was diagnosed with AIDS at 13 in 1984 and died in 1990. The bill provides medical care, medication, and support services to about 500,000, mostly poor, people.

"If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it. And that's why, on Monday my administration will publish a final rule that eliminates the travel ban effective just after the New Year. Congress and President Bush began this process last year, and they ought to be commended for it. We are finishing the job. It's a step that will encourage people to get tested and get treatment, it's a step that will keep families together, and it's a step that will save lives."

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The travel ban, imposed 22 years ago, will be lifted in January, according to a final regulation that will be published Monday, Obama said.

Similar restrictions are in place in about a dozen countries to protect public health. But Obama said the travel ban unnecessarily reinforces the stigma of AIDS.

Senator John F. Kerry, who co-authored legislation that the Senate passed last year to lift the ban, praised Obama's decision, asserting that the 1987 provision baring HIV-positive individuals from travelling or immigrating to the US covered doctors and experts, as well as refugees seeking asylum despite the lack of scientific evidence supporing the ban as an effective tool for disease control.

“Today a discriminatory travel and immigration ban has gone the way of the dinosaur and we’re glad it’s finally extinct. It sure took too long to get here,” Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. “We’ve now removed one more hurdle in our fight against AIDS, and it’s long overdue for people living with HIV who battle against stigma and bigotry day in and day out.”

“At long last, our nation’s unjust policy of excluding HIV-positive visitors and immigrants has ended,” added Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, in a statement issued by Kerry's office. “We applaud the leadership of our allies in Congress, especially Senator Kerry, and of President Obama and Secretary Sebelius in bringing this discriminatory chapter of our history to a close.”

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