Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!usc!ucla-cs!Rob.Bates@p1.f381.n634.z3.fidonet.org From: Rob.Bates@p1.f381.n634.z3.fidonet.org (Rob Bates) Newsgroups: sci.med.aids Subject: Australian AIDS News Message-ID: <27501@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> Date: 27 Sep 89 19:47:17 GMT Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU Organization: FidoNet node 3:634/381.1 - Big Tedd's BBS, Armadale Vic Aust Lines: 73 Approved: aids@cs.ucla.edu Archive-number: 1267 HARD LINES AT AUSTRALIAN BIOETHICS CONFERENCE by Adam Carr (Reproduced with permission from Melbourne Star Observer #105, 22 September 1989 (C) MSO and OZ Media Ltd). A national conference on AIDS and Bioethics was held in Adelaide on September 5-7. Although attendance was greatly reduced by the airlines dispute, about 150 people managed to get there. They heard a lively and challenging discussion of some of the ethical issues surrounding AIDS from local and overseas speakers. The tone of the conference was generally conservative, although a wide range of points of view was represented in the audience. People with HIV or AIDS were notably absent from both the speakers' platform and the audience, and people actually involved in the fight against AIDS were in the minority. Many attendees were clergy or people from Christian organizations, including many from the Catholic health and welfare systems. Two international speakers gave keynote papers. Professor Charles Vella, a Maltese-born Catholic priest and director of a large AIDS hospital in Milano, Italy, spoke eloquently on the duty of healthcare workers to AIDS patients, and also on the duty of Christians to offer compassion and care to all people with AIDS, regardless of their opinions on the lifestyles or practices that may have led to infection. Vella emerged as the main champion of "practical ethics" at the conference. Dr David Pence, an American doctor and lecturer, gave a more controversial paper, focussing on what he saw as the ethical obligations of governments and health professonals to ignore political objections and to apply rigorous public health measures, such as contact tracing and isolation, to stopping the spread of HIV. Pence is an articulate and in many ways attractive speaker, but most in the audience found his views hard to accept in full. He believes, for example, that homosexuality and prostitution should be criminalized. The other major address was from Hiram Caton, Professor of Politics at Griffith University, Brisbane. Caton, in a highly polemical paper, claimed that AIDS education in Australia had failed through its failure to address ethical questions and its reliance, as he saw it, on advertising techniques. He also strongly opposed school-based AIDS education that appeared to condone sexual activity and drug use by school students. Many (including Professor Vella) felt that the credibility of Caton's paper was weakened by its heavily sarcastic tone and its obviously political intent. The two days of the conference was mostly taken up with debating these issues in a workshop format. I found these debates very stimulating, since I was forced to go back to basics and to defend the record (and indeed the existence) of the gay community and of the AIDS Councils from fundamental principles. It is a long time since I have had to debate the proposition that homosexuality is a "moral evil". These debates were important, because many uncommitted people were there, and were being exposed to some of these issues for the first time. Some of these people will soon be making decisions that may effect the health- care of people with AIDS. The conference cannot simply be written off as a right-wing wank, as I think some people have been tempted to do. Despite his less- than-friendly views on homosexuality, Dr Pence made some telling points about the medical and governmental response to AIDS, and raised issues that AIDS Councils are certainly going to have to address more directly in the future than we have done so far. Despite the horrors of flying to Adelaide in a small metal tube with propellers, and the indignity of having to come home by bus, I think the conference was important, and it will probably be the first shot in a debate that will become more intense as the epidemic progresses. (Adam Carr is Vice-President of the Victorian AIDS Council. His views as expressed in the Star Observer are personal ones.) -- Uucp: ...{gatech,ames,rutgers}!ncar!noao!asuvax!stjhmc!3!634!381.1!Rob.Bates Internet: Rob.Bates@p1.f381.n634.z3.fidonet.org