Sometimes I have the feeling Greek authorities are drawn inside one spoon full of water. After the arrest of at least 12 HIV-positive prostitutes that exposed an alarming number of brainless customers and the lack of suffiecient state health controls in the dark corridors of “love” for sale, Greek Health Minister Andreas Loverdos proposed the criminalization of s*x with prostitutes without condom.
Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday morning Loverdos described the customers as “donkeys” for not using condoms when in touch with prostitutes. “50% of the responsibility is on the prostitutes and 50% is on their customers,” he said. Describing the customer’s behaviour as “grave negligence”, Loverdos noted that “They ignore everything, they go without protection to uncontrolled areas and then return to their wives, to their stable relationships and infect them.”
The usually upset minister said also that even the customers’ pictures should be published. Indeed, Loverdos went so far to say that “there should be a criminal liability for those seeking unsafe s*x with prostitutes.”
While experts and media speak of a “health bomb” in downtown Athens, Chairwoman of Centre for Disease Protection & Prevention, Jenny Kremastinou, said that after the publication of the names and pictures of the 12 prostitutes on Sunday evening, more than 1,600 men called the centre and asked for advice. Kremastinou said several phone callers were married men with families. And that the majority of all the men they called were between 35 to 45 years old.
Kremastinou said also that from the end of 2010 onward, the AIDS spread increased at 1,250%among users of “intravenous drugs” and 52% among the general polulation.
Concerning the criticism about publishing the names and pictures of the HIV positive women, Loverdos answered that this action aims to protect public health.
As ‘brainlessity’ is a disease difficult to cure and before publicly expose our male partners to the delight of grumpy old aunties and judging mothers-in-law, or charge police-officers to “missions-impossible”, Greek Health Ministry could launch an urgent Safe-S*x campaign – as a friendly and constructive reminder…
they need to get in contact with http://www.omsj.org and its HIV Innocence Group
Your post is too lukewarm not to merit a response. It seems that you are more upset about the fact that Greek government means to criminalise unsafe sex and the clients of prostitution rather than the fact that it IS effectively criminalising HIV-positive prostitutes for the fact that they are HIV-positive as the prosecutore has and continues to charge these women with grave bodily harm!! The persons responsible for this crime, yes crime, should be brought to justice by the people, the prosecutor and more importantly the MInistry of Health employees who collaborate with cops and the media in TOTALLY breaching their oath and duty to protect the privacy and identity of HIV-positive persons and instead of treating them persecute them!! they deserve an exemplary punishment….i can only thinkg of one other time in recent history where unhealthy people were punished by the state…it was the 1930s and 40s in Germany when the Nazis were in power…
you have to read our other posts to have a clear picture about our point of view on the issue of exposing private data and medical records even of prostitutes. You should also wonder why we do not posted their pictures while we could. KEELPNO had alarming figures about the issue since 2010, and nothing was done (no raids and health control checks, not campaigns). Weren’t they aware of all these African girls (some even 10-12 yrs old) seeking customers around Omonia Sq at night? For years! Probably they weren’t- until a week before the elections. Therefore our criticism. Also we wonder how criminalizing the unsafe s*x would be implemented in real practice.
In this figures were available, but the health authorities, government, all politicians and even the broader public choose to ignore them. Why, I want to ask. For god sake, why?! It is playing with live and death. And it is not that there are no examples on how to educate a whole population about the deadly risk of HIV.
Regular campaigns in the media. Education on schools… just make it part of the curriculum. And lots of other things. All done to ingrain into the general consciousness what the deadly risks are of one, yes just ONE, ‘fun’ evening or couple of minutes. You will be sick your whole life, when you are lucky, or die. And you will be a killer if you go on sleeping with others…
Loverdos, and the other politicians, have to be careful though. As clear-cut it may seem to criminalize unsafe s*x, how justified it looks to slam heavy fines or prison sentences on this behavior, there is a downside. And that is that people won’t be willing to come forward when they get infected. And that will be an even bigger health thread.
Politicking with stuff like this is of the lowest order.
and prostitutes will hide their sickness too
as usual, if the pictures wer eto rpotect innocent wives and children, then the brainless customers’ pictures should have been published.
“politicking with stuff like this is of the lowest order”
well this whole business is politics. It’s happening the week before the elections and it is the most predictable behavior ever and still we all suck it up! In every single election in the past few years the government who want to be reelected and all the other parties go on a massive rant about…immigration-crime-security-clean cities…they find an enemy to scaremonger the public with and have a competition on who is going to be the bigger nazi in dealing with. Then the party in power organise some spectacular and very visible but of course utterly ineffective “actions” like “sweeping” up the streets of people whose only crime is that they dont have the right papers (or perhaps they missed a payment to the local pig for the right to walk the streets) or stuff like this sweeping health controls to make it look like that they are really dealing with the HIV problem when in fact when you visit a state hospital and ask about how you can get tested they tell you you got to pay somehting like 40 to 60 euros for it if you are not insured (and of course they made sure with their latest policies that most people are not insured)…so thats how they prevent disease! What it comes down to is that they manage to divert the agenda on something other than what really affects our lives which is the politics of austerity and repression that they are responsible for and attempt to convince us that more prisons will make eveythring better…So by turning this issue into some apolitical campaign about safe sex and educating the public we fall right into their trap! Wake up! noone in this bloody systerm gives a f***k about your wellbeing! they just want your vote.
Why can’t they wank like a junkie on turkey 6 times in front of their mirror? This MEN are racist rapist scum and the government only wants to create a new cheap fuckker sector for tourism