When a Toronto man was charged last week with sexual assault for knowingly exposing his girlfriend to HIV, it seemed like the logical action for police to take, and followed the pattern of an increasing number of such cases.
It was the second charge of its sort in two weeks in Ontario, and comes in the midst of a landmark murder trial of an HIV carrier who allegedly infected several women, two of whom later died of AIDS.
But HIV advocacy groups -- and now two respected AIDS scientists -- say such prosecutions are doing more harm than good, and are calling for authorities to stop criminalizing what they consider a public-health issue.
Dr. Mark Wainberg, a Montreal scientist who headed the International AIDS Society for two years, publicly joined the anti-criminalization movement with an editorial in the journal Retrovirology last month, and admits his stance might seem "counter-intuitive."
But, like others, he argued that publicity about the scores of criminal HIV cases that have cropped up across Canada is adding to the negative aura around the disease, discouraging people from coming forward to get tested, and thus furthering the virus's spread.
The criminal law should be used when someone deliberately tries to infect another person -- through a needle prick or similar malicious action -- but not in the context of consensual sex, he said.
"We don't want to stigmatize and, in a way, you are stigmatizing HIV-positive status," said Dr. Wainberg, who received the Order of Canada for his HIV-AIDS research. "We're not doing enough to encourage testing, and decriminalizing transmission would be a step in the right direction."
Dr. Wainberg conceded that there is little empirical evidence yet that criminal cases are, in fact, keeping potentially infected people underground.
But a study about to get underway in Ontario will examine how the criminal cases are affecting people who already know they are HIV-positive, said Barry Adam, a University of Windsor sociologist and research director of the Ontario HIV Treatment Network, who is leading the survey.
Not everyone in the field, though, views the criminal cases with distaste. Dr. Robert Remis, head of Ontario Epidemiologic Monitoring Unit, said other avenues, such as counselling and public health laws should be used first on people who exhibit irresponsible sexual behaviour. But using the criminal law is "just the right thing to do" in some circumstances, he said.
"To knowingly and sort of willfully expose someone else to a what can be a fatal disease I think is unacceptable," said Dr. Remis.
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