AIDS Tagging Raises Eyebrows and Controversy

Tiny electronic tracking devices known as microchips are used in the United States, mostly to tag puppies in case they run away without their leash. A new law yet to pass in Indonesia may have humans tagged not for running away but for having HIV or AIDS, as a deterrent to furthering the disease.

Indonesia is vast becoming Asia’s petri dish for rapidly growing HIV infection rates. The numbers are estimated at 290,000 infections within a concentration of 235 million people and the rates are growing due to a lack of education and a greater lack of condom use fueled by prostitution and cultural rituals involving swapping sexual partners. Intravenous drug use is also contributing to this surge of HIV cases in this part of the world.

The residents of the small province of Papua are strong-arming a bill that would require patients with HIV or AIDS to be implanted with microchips in order for officials to be able to monitor and (hopefully) control the spread of this incurable disease. Legislator John Manangsang justifies the actions by saying that the microchips would only be helping to identify and track those affected that are “sexually aggressive,” meaning that they knowingly have the disease and are actively spreading it to others intentionally. Along with the microchip implantation, patients chosen who are abusing others by infecting a healthy person would be able to be punished with either a $5,000 fine or up to a six-month prison term.

Papua, Indonesia’s smallest and poorest province has been hit hardest with the number of infections and is therefore trying to take immediate action to lower their risks. With around 2 million residents, an average of 61 out of every 100,000 people carry HIV or the AIDS virus; Papua has 15 times the national average. Poor knowledge of sexually transmitted diseases within this province is to blame according to a 2007 international study. Weynand Watari, who is pro-microchip, sees these tags as "our future in order to identify everything we hold of value like we already do with our pets and cell phones, The health situation is extraordinary, so we have to take extraordinary action.”

Extraordinary action, the legislators agree, is to monitor those with HIV or AIDS in order to suppress the disease and prevent it from being contracted without knowledge. The details aren’t completely agreed upon, however but there will be a committee formed in order to decide who should get the chips that would be placed just beneath the skin and who is sexually tame enough not to be monitored. Exactly who would be implanted and how many that entails is not clear yet neither is the extent of the microchip control, if the law is passed. The forty-some-odd articles of the bill do require HIV tests by so that the preventative measures can be started early. If majority vote gets their way, which is the popular opinion of Papua, the bill will be in effect as early as next month, Manangsang notes.

While prevention should be the number one goal, especially when it comes to the most dangerous virus in the world, local activists and health employees abhor the bylaw and protest its lawmakers. To date, there has been no other country that has tried to monitor the spread of HIV or AIDS using microchips and Nancy Fee, UNAIDS coordinator for Indonesia sees large concerns ahead for general health and human rights, "No one should be subject to unlawful or unnecessary interference of privacy," says Fee, she also adds that most times extreme measures like this don’t work but only succeed in pushing the problem farther away from a solution.

Popular activist from Papua Tahi Ganyang Butarbutar says, "People with AIDS aren't animals; we have to respect their rights," Butarbutar goes on to say that the best way to attack the widespread epidemic is by teaching the importance of condom use as well as increase sexual knowledge. Even the head of Papua’s national AIDS Commission was quoted as saying that this law violates human rights.

This “simple technology” as one lawmaker termed it, seems like a good theory, but it may come at the price of human rights. Sure, microchips could be helpful in tracking cattle in order to make sure food doesn’t get contaminated or laboratory animals in order to record potentially life-saving data, but using microchips in humans would be like wearing an electric dog collar with a built-in probation officer and surveillance equipment at the helm for misuses such as unprotected sexual activity and shared-needle drug use. Regardless of the ways the microchip and its officers plan to monitor such “punishable” behavior, it carries a huge risk for the value of human life, which a six-month jail stint or a hefty fine won’t save.