For my Health Policy & Administration course, part of the Master of Public Health program at the University of Nevada, Reno, I wrote this paper on the necessity to decriminalize those living with HIV in Nevada.
HIV is not the same disease as it was in the 1980s and early 1990s, but while this is true, there is still a vestige of AIDS Hysteria in Nevada law that is bad public health policy and empowers prosecutors to use someone’s knowledge of their HIV status against them in court. The legislature should repeal Title 15, Chapter 201, Section 205 of the Nevada Revised Statues a “crime against public decency and good morals – the intentional transmission of HIV.” The criminalization of HIV transmission is the only disease-specific criminal statute that exists in Nevada and many jurisdictions worldwide. Several of these laws were enacted before the advent of effective treatment for HIV and when rumor, stigma, and hysteria drove public perception of the disease. The year 1996 marked the publication of research that determined HIV could be controlled with combination antiretroviral therapy (ART) and in 2011, evidence was presented related to treatment as prevention, that people living with HIV and on treatment had a much-reduced chance of transmitting the virus to a seronegative partner (Hammer et al., 1996; Cohen, 2011). In 2012, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a biomedical intervention that is near universally effective in preventing seroconversion (e.g. transmission). With these advancements in the HIV prevention and care and because criminal law should not be used as a method to discriminate against any class of people it is time to repeal the criminalization of HIV.
For the whole paper, please click here.
Timothy K. Taycher 