Abstract

Over the past three decades, the World Health Organization has negotiated a global consensus among activists, governments, and the pharmaceutical industry with regard to the human rights of persons with AIDS, and those at highest risk of contracting HIV. More recently, epidemiologic modelers have proposed a “treatment as prevention” in which strategies like safe sex and harm reduction are considered unnecessary because mass HIV testing and aggressive maintenance of individual with HIV are believed sufficient to drive down population level viral load, thereby decreasing the individual odds of encounter a person with infectious HIV. This article considers the historical evolution of the human rights approach to HIV, and analyzes the loss in rights and dignity that may accrue from a shift toward a population-level approach to prevention.