Lift of HIV

[Homicidalheathen]

Twenty-two years ago, in a decision rooted in fear rather than fact, the United States instituted a travel ban on entry into the country for people living with HIV/AIDS," Obama said as he signed a bill reauthorizing funding for a federal program providing HIV-related health care."Now, we talk about reducing the stigma of this disease -- yet we've treated a visitor living with it as a threat," he said at the signing ceremony of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act.

"If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it. And that's why on Monday, my administration will publish a final rule that eliminates the travel ban effective just after the New Year," Obama said.

Obama's predecessor George W. Bush signed legislation last year that removed HIV from a list of diseases "of public health significance" that effectively barred any person infected with HIV from entering the United States.

But the law was not implemented by the US Department of Health and Human Services, which regulates US immigration authorities in some instances.

Human rights and HIV/AIDS activism groups hailed the end of the controversial ban, saying it would put the US back in a leadership role in the fight against the illness and would help to lift the stigma associated with AIDS.

Physicians for Human Rights said the ban had "made the United States a pariah in human rights circles, and harmed our reputation as a world leader of HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and care."

The HIV Medicine Association (HIVMA) bade the ban "good riddance," saying the "discriminatory rule... had no basis in public health or sound science.

"This long-overdue move brings the US in line with current scientific and international standards of public health and will lessen the painful stigma and discrimination suffered by HIV-positive people," HIVMA chairwoman Arlene Bardeguez said in a statement.

The Ryan White bill, which was first passed 19 years ago, is named after a 13-year-old boy who contracted HIV during a blood transfusion in 1984 -- a time when the virus was first becoming known and was hugely misunderstood.

"It was coined a 'gay disease'.... There was a sense among some that people afflicted by AIDS somehow deserved their fate and that it was acceptable for our nation to look the other way," Obama said, adding that events and advances -- and the efforts of people like Ryan White's family -- "have broadened our understanding of this cruel illness."

The ban on HIV-positive foreigners entering the United States had been in place since 1987 -- three years before Ryan White died and the law that now bears his name was first passed.

Obama made the announcement in the US capital, where three percent of all residents over the age of 12 have HIV or full-blown AIDS.

The United Nations' HIV/AIDS agency and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have said HIV is "generalized and severe" when one percent of a given population is infected.

Some 1.1 million people in the United States are believed to have HIV, according to the CDC