Do you think the confidentiality laws will change in the wake of the Nushawn Williams case?
I think a lot of society’s anger is going to be vented on Nushawn Williams, even though he wasn’t arrested for infecting someone with HIV; he was arrested for the statutory rape of a 13-year-old. So public opinion might change the laws. The other thing that may cause change in confidentiality laws is that when they were written in the early ’80s, there was absolutely no treatment. AIDS was a fatal disease. So why identify people without guaranteeing them confidentiality if there’s nothing you can do to cure it? But nowadays we have combination therapies and the use of protease inhibitors, which may change the way people look at HIV and AIDS. They could end up looking at HIV and AIDS as they do syphilis, and go after all the sexual partners and treat them and cure them. One of the reasons the confidentiality law was passed was to encourage people to come in and get tested. One of the potential downsides of the law being changed is people might be frightened to come in and get tested; th
