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A prominent Australian eye surgeon caused a storm of protest this week
when he warned that AIDS could devastate the Aboriginal population unless
steps are taken to ‘monitor and control’ people who may introduce the
disease to remote communities.

About 15 000 people in Australia are HIV-positive, of whom 90 per cent
are homosexual men. Cases of HIV infection have not been classified by race,
but Aborigines with the virus are thought to live largely in cities, rather
than in rural areas.

Last week’s statements by Fred Hollows, an ophthalmologist known for
his work on eye disease in Eritrea and other parts of Africa, have been
widely interpreted as calling for the quarantining of Aborigines with AIDS.
But Hollows, who was speaking at a conference in Alice Springs, denies that
this is what he advocates.

The conference passed a resolution condemning much of what Hollows
had to say. It said: ‘This conference rejects the damaging statements by
Professor Fred Hollows regarding the quarantining of Aboriginal people
living with AIDS. His statements, which received sensational media coverage,
were uninformed and harrnful to positive education strategies currently
being used by Aboriginal people.’

Hollows has worked extensively on eye disease among Aborigines. He told
the conference that ‘expert people’ he had spoken to believed that the heterosexual
transmission of HIV could ‘quite quickly’ become established in the Aboriginal
community. If this happened it could lead to death rates comparable to those
during the smallpox epidemics of 1789 and 1829.

‘I know of the devastation of AIDS in Africa and I don’t want that to
happen to Aboriginal people in Australia,’ Hollows said when explaining
his comments. He listed nine points that he said should be considered by
the Aboriginal community. These included avoiding many sexual partners,
the ‘watching and control’ of movements of Aborigines between city and country,
and direct intervention to prevent intravenous drug use.

Kathy Kum-Sing, who coordinates work on AIDS among Aborigines in New
South Wales, said that Hollows’s views were ‘out of date and culturally
inappropriate for Aboriginal people’. Sol Bellear, of the Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Commission, said: ‘We want to include HIV-positive
people in our communities, not reject them.