Shagamama

The latest panic – and there has to be one, given that it is a prerequisite of life on a small, claustrophobic island – is that we are about to infected with HIV en masse. When the head of the state hospital’s pathology department told the press that half of all those being treated for HIV in Malta are African immigrants, the furore was predictable. You would think, from the fuss, that you can get HIV from strap-hanging on a bus or walking past an African immigrant on the street.

The other 50 per cent of HIV patients are non-African (it doesn’t follow that they are all Maltese), but this is not considered significant because it is the ratio that is the news. African immigrants make up just a tiny part of our population, but this part of the population is the pool for half our HIV cases. What the press failed to ask, and this does not come as a surprise, is the nature of the other 50%. Are they predominantly homosexual men? The last time I looked, they were, with a couple of heroin addicts thrown in.

Somehow, I can’t see a headline that says: ‘50% of HIV cases involve homosexual men’. The newspaper might find itself accused of inciting homophobia. So why, then, is it all right to announce that 50% of HIV cases are African? Because, in the current climate, it is considered quite acceptable to further stir the pot of anti-African resentment. Fortunately, we have come quite a way since the time, not so long ago, when HIV was linked in our minds with homosexual men. If you’ve forgotten the days when a certain sort of person automatically assumed that all homosexual men were infected with HIV, then routinely referred to as AIDS, and rushed to the nearest tap to wash his or her hands after coming into contact with ‘a gay’, then I haven’t. And now we are going to do exactly the same thing with Africans, stigmatising an entire category of people as HIV-ridden.

The real problem, and this is almost certainly why the head of the pathology department expressed his concern, is that Maltese people tend to be cavalier about condoms and are also increasingly promiscuous. Twenty years ago, your average Maltese man thought he had died and gone to heaven if he found a woman willing to have sex with him without a ring on her finger and a five-year courtship. And if she was a tourist, here today and gone tomorrow, he thought he had sprouted wings and was playing a harp on a cloud. Now all the excitement comes not from finding somebody who will have sex with you, because unless you are impossibly grotesque you will, but from finding somebody who will have sex with you without a condom. And from the statistics that are furnished every so often by the clinic for sexually transmitted diseases, there are plenty of those.

So the problem is not so much African immigrants with HIV as the Maltese who cannot be trusted to have enough commonsense not to sleep around or, if they do sleep around, to use a rubber-johnny. The doctor in fact drew parallels with the re-emergence of syphilis in Malta. It had been eradicated here, but it’s a common sexually-transmitted disease in eastern Europe. Maltese men travelling to that part of the continent for as many sexual encounters as can be crammed into leave of absence from work – and I assume, some Maltese women, too – bring back a rather large souvenir in the form of syphilis, and then pass it on to their unsuspecting partners or spouses.

Christopher Barbara, for that is the doctor’s name, found it necessary to get back to basics. “You can’t just go and have sex with anyone,” he told the press. Ah, but your Maltese average Joe thinks he can, having been raised in a macho society which thinks sex without a condom is the only way to do it. What can I say? We have that in common with sub-Saharan Africa, though your average Joe here would break up an entire bar rather than face that fact.

Dr Barbara is against compulsory HIV tests for immigrants for the obvious human rights reasons. You can’t just shove a needle into somebody’s arm as soon as he lands and take a blood sample, tagging both him and the sample to correlate them afterwards. And you certainly can’t do that to one group of incoming people and not to others. Eastern Europeans and Maltese people returning from eastern Europe are the greatest source of syphilis in these islands, but nobody is suggesting compulsory testing for them, or forcing them to wear a badge that indicates them to be infected with the disease that sent so many potentates mad in the past, when it couldn’t be treated.

So the fact that 50% of HIV patients are African made the headlines. But to my mind, the real headline was buried deep in the last paragraph of the news report in The Sunday Times. Dr Barbara said that when HIV patients take their medication haphazardly, treatment-resistant strains of the disease develop in their bloodstream. So he has reached the conclusion that African immigrants should not be treated for HIV, as they cannot be trusted to take their medication properly and will become centres for the development of drug-resistant HIV, which they can then pass on to the Maltese.

I don’t know about you, but I think that the rationale behind this statement is quite appalling. Provide no treatment to Africans with HIV, and let them die a horrible death, to protect those Maltese, who want a quick shag without a condom, from the possibility of contracting drug-resistant HIV.

The way I see it, whether a Maltese person contracts drug-resistant HIV from an African who hasn’t taken regular medication is something entirely within his or her control. The very thought of allowing people to die untreated just so that Joey l-Werqa will be relatively safe when he has a quick one for a fiver (“imma minghajr condom, ta”) is hideous. And I hope the Ministry of Health can see that.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.