Posted on 07/24/2007 9:29:33 AM PDT by kiriath_jearim
Lawmakers in Indonesia's Papua are mulling the selective use of chip implants in HIV carriers to monitor their behaviour in a bid to keep them from infecting others, a doctor said Tuesday.
John Manangsang, a doctor who is helping to prepare a new healthcare regulation bill for Papua's provincial parliament, said that unusual measures were needed to combat the virus.
"We in the government in Papua have to think hard on ways to provide protection to people from the spread of the disease," Manangsang told AFP.
"Some of the infected people experience a change of behaviour and can turn more aggressive and would not think twice of infecting others," he alleged, saying lawmakers were considering various sanctions for these people.
"Among one of the means being considered is the monitoring of those infected people who can pose a danger to others," Manangsang said.
"The use of chip implants is one of the ways to do so, but only for those few who turn aggressive and clearly continue to disregard what they know about the disease and spread the virus to others," he said.
A decision was still a long way off, he added.
The head of the Papua chapter of the National AIDS Commission, Constant Karma, reportedly slammed the proposal as a violation of human rights.
"People with HIV/AIDS are not like sharks under observation so that they have to be implanted with microchips to monitor their movements," he told the Jakarta Post on Tuesday.
"Any form of identification of people with HIV/AIDS violates human rights."
According to data from Papua's health office cited by the Post, the province has just over 3,000 people living with HIV/AIDS. Some 356 deaths have been reported. Papua has a population of about 2.5 million.
Considering they are carriers of a 100% fatal disease, they should be quarantined.
This is the core reason why HIV is raging out of control. If it has been treated as the lethal, incurable, communicable disease that it is, we might have controlled and eliminated it. Political correctness will kill millions.
The microchip issue is orthogonal. It wouldn't do squat to identify or prevent the spreads of AIDS. The infected parties have to be prevented from interacting with uninfected persons. They won't do that voluntarily.
I'm opposed to involuntary microchipping of humans. The microchip is a reasonable way to label pets and livestock who cannot speak for themselves as a means of return to the property owner. A removable wristwatch size GPS/radio is a valuable aid to an Alzheimer's patient. It beats the hell out of wandering off, getting lost and dying in a ditch.
A chronic DUI needs a 5 year incarceration to dry out. Revoking a driver's license isn't enough to keep these people off the road. My deceased father-in-law was a drunk with a revoked driver's license. That didn't keep him off the road. The only thing that stopped him was congestive heart failure.
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