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Fear of arrest results in
Egyptian gays not having HIV tests
04 April 2006- The lack of
gay and bisexual men in Egypt requesting tests for HIV has been blamed
on police raids based on medical records kept at hospitals.
According to figures released covering the period 2003-2004, less than
0.1 percent of Egyptian adults carry the HIV virus, but experts warn
that Egyptian society has the conditions necessary to cause a rapidly
increasing infection rate.
With a population of 73 million, the country is the most populous Arab
state. Over half (56 per cent) are under twenty five and chronic youth
unemployment has been blamed for a huge growth in pre-marital and gay
sex.
In 2001, a number of men were arrested by police following a raid of a
Cairo gay meeting point and information recorded from gay websites have
resulted in numerous raids in recent years.
"It won't change a thing,” a man who did not wish to be named told the
Reuters news agency. “The Egyptian government wants to pretend gays
don't exist, not help them. People like to believe that this is an
Islamic society, therefore, there are no gays.”
The man told reporters that he self identified as bisexual but that he
would eventually marry a woman. He claimed to have been undergone
regular HIV tests but said that most of his gay and bisexual friends did
not and that they often had unprotected bareback sex.
"Some think that if you only see Egyptians you won't get AIDS, or that
if the whites of their eyes are very clear, they don't have HIV," he
said, adding that many prostitutes consider westerners to be HIV-free
and therefore do not require the use of a condom.
Maha Aon of the United Nations said that Egypt had made progress in
combating the spread of HIV. For the past two years, testing has been
freely available and is legally anonymous. Since last year, access to
HIV treatment has also been free.
"We don't have a visible or very prevalent epidemic. It's very much a
silent epidemic, ” said Ms Aon. “Of course if you sit back and think
logically, the time to act is now, before it becomes much more difficult
to control and much more expensive."
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