Disability and HIV: Critical Intersections
The relationship between HIV and disability is complex, but critical, because disabled people are vulnerable to HIV infection, while people living with HIV are at high risk of impairment. But this relationship remains largely unexplored in disability stud
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Disability and HIV: Critical Intersections Ruth Evans, Yaw Adjei-Amoako, and Agnes Atim
Introduction The relationship between HIV and disability is complex, but critical, because disabled people are vulnerable to HIV infection, while people living with HIV are at high risk of impairment. But this relationship remains largely unexplored in disability studies, epidemiology, global health, development and associated fields, and disability issues have been largely neglected in global and national HIV policy responses. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) does not explicitly refer to HIV in the definition of disability. However, UNAIDS et al. (2009: 1) note that: States are required to recognize that where persons living with HIV (asymptomatic or symptomatic) have impairments which, in interaction with the environment, results in stigma, discrimination or other barriers to their participation, they can fall under the protection of the Convention.
In 2009, UNAIDS in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights highlighted the lack of data on the prevalence and incidence of HIV among disabled people and the need for all HIV programmes to address the concerns of disabled people. Yet disability and disabled people were mentioned in only one paragraph of the 110-page UNAIDS (2012) Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic and are not mentioned at all in the 2013 report, despite considerable data and attention paid to other
R. Evans ( ) • Y. Adjei-Amoako Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Reading, Reading, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] A. Atim Hope Development Initiative, Kampala, Uganda e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 S. Grech, K. Soldatic (eds.), Disability in the Global South, International Perspectives on Social Policy, Administration, and Practice, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42488-0_22
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vulnerable populations, such as children (aged under 15) and young people (aged 15–24) and ‘key populations at higher risk’, such as sex workers, people who inject drugs and men who have sex with men (UNAIDS 2013: 32). This continuing lack of data on HIV prevalence among disabled people globally obscures their specific needs and requirements in accessing HIV prevention, treatment, care and support services. It also makes invisible the links between the situation of people living with HIV and disabled people, overlooking these complex issues. People living with HIV1 (PLHIV) are not usually defined as disabled people, unless they have specific long-term impairments, despite some countries (including the UK and Australia) according protection to PLHIV under national disability legislation (DRC 2005; Hanass-Hancock and Nixon 2009). The disability movement has been reluctant to regard PLHIV as disabled people (Evans and Atim 2011), largely due to social model perspectives that reject the notion of disability as
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