JAKARTA (ASEAN Features) -- When a person known with HIV/AIDS checks into a hospital, the patient's registration sheet may carry the code "SIDA", French for AIDS. Bed sheets can be similarly marked and the AIDS patient may be separated from other sick people. Hospital staff may not even want to touch the patient - a social outcast. These are the subtle and less subtle forms of discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS in the health service rooted more in fear than in ignorance. At the end of 2001, according to UNAIDS, 7.1 million people in Asia and the Pacific were living with HIV, the virus that makes the human body's immune system defenseless against killer diseases.

      "Hospital personnel know enough information about AIDS. But out of lack of care and fear, doctors are afraid to treat AIDS patients. Moreover, intimidating media reports about AIDS feed into that fear," says Daniel Marguari, program manager of the Spiritia Foundation, a Jakarta based non-government organization that advocates for the needs and rights of people living with HIV/AIDS or PLWHA.

      The denial of equal treatment to people with AIDS is such a festering issue that discrimination and stigma was a topical theme in the XIV International Conference on AIDS in Barcelona, in July 2002.

      Discrimination is not only in the health sector. In the work place, a person publicly identified with AIDS can be fired. Even at home, when a person known to be suffering from HIV/AIDS, wants to buy a rice dish from a street vendor, the vendor would insist the customer use his or her own plate, says Christin Wahyuni, Spiritia program officer for greater involvement of people living with or affected by HIV/AIDS (GIPA). Confidentiality is a right denied in many instances that have threatened the well being of people with HIV/AIDS, Spiritia points out.

      The media can also contribute in scaring and deepening discrimination and stigmatization towards PLWHA. Oftentimes, when the media show their faces and state their names without their consent, they violate the rights of people with AIDS, Wahyuni continues.

      One way people with HIV/AIDS can fight discrimination is to know what their rights are. Spiritia meets with all stakeholders: health authorities, private companies, local officials, the media and [AIDS affected] PLWHA to advocate that people with AIDS have the same rights as other people. The NGO published a 1999 48-page booklet, Empowering Patients, that informs people with HIV/AIDS what their rights are when checking into a hospital or consulting a doctor.

      The chapter on "How to Use a Visit to the Doctor," for instance, urges patients not to hesitate to ask questions until all the doctor's explanations are clearly understood. This includes questions on the use, direction of use, and possible side effects of a prescribed drug.

      Advocacy work to reduce discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS does not stop at individual countries. At the regional level, the Singapore-based Asia Pacific Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS, or APN+, is undertaking a survey on discrimination. The survey employs PLWHA as researchers to interview people with AIDS in a number of Asian and Pacific nations on the range and type of discrimination they face. By recruiting people with HIV/AIDS, the study hopes to empower people living with HIV/AIDS. Hopefully the survey results will be published in a manual and help people with AIDS deal with discrimination, says Brenton Wong, regional coordinator of APN+, an NGO with a network working in six ASEAN member countries.

      A key to end such discrimination is empowerment that allows people with HIV/AIDS to participate in the decision-making processes that affect them. ASEAN has been forthcoming on that score. At a meeting prior to the seventh summit of ASEAN leaders in Brunei Darussalam November 2001, a Southeast Asia based person living with AIDS (PWA) spoke at a formal ASEAN session. At that meeting, he emphasized the need to include PWAs at all levels and to also show by example that engaging PWAs can benefit governments and PWAs.

      "It was for the first time for (ASEAN) delegates to meet with a PWA. Finally they could put a human face on the disease," the PWA representative exclaims. ### JV/WD