US lifts travel ban on HIV positive immigrants

November 9, 2009 ( ADDIS ABABA) — The USA has reversed its controversial policy of rejecting HIV-positive immigrants.

President Barack Obama explained that the US will overturn the 20-year-old travel ban early next year.

"If we want to be a global leader in combating HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it," Obama said at the White House before signing a bill to extend the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program.

Begun in 1990, the program provides medical care, medication and support services to about half a million people, most of them on low-incomes.

The bill is named after an Indiana teenager who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion at age 13. White went on to fight AIDS-related discrimination against him and others like him and help educate the country about the disease. He died in April 1990 at the age of 18.

His mother, Jeanne White-Ginder, attended the signing ceremony, as did several members of Congress and HIV/AIDS activists.

In 1987, at a time of widespread fear and ignorance about HIV, the Department of Health and Human Services added the disease to the list of communicable diseases that disqualified a person from entering the U.S.

The department tried in 1991 to reverse its decision, but was opposed by Congress, which in 1993 went the other way and made HIV infection the only medical condition explicitly listed under immigration law as grounds for inadmissibility to the U.S.

The law effectively has kept out thousands of students, tourists and refugees and has complicated the adoption of children with HIV. No major international AIDS conference has been held in the US since 1993, because HIV-positive activists and researchers cannot enter the country.

Obama said lifting the ban "is a step that will save lives" by encouraging people to get tested and to get treatment.

Rachel B. Tiven, executive director of Immigration Equality, said the ban pointlessly barred people from the US and separated families with no benefit to public health.