(Jackson, Miss.) The Mississippi Department of Corrections  agreed to end the segregation of prisoners with HIV, a longstanding discriminatory policy that has prevented prisoners from accessing key resources that facilitate their successful transition back into the community.

The decision by Mississippi’s corrections commissioner Christopher Epps, prompted by recent advocacy by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, leaves Alabama and South Carolina as the only states in the nation that segregate prisoners based on their HIV status. Epps made the decision ahead of a forthcoming report by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch analyzing the harmful impact segregation policies have had in the three states.

“Commissioner Epps deserves a tremendous amount of credit for making this courageous decision to replace a policy based on irrational HIV prejudice with a policy based on science, sound correctional practice and respect for human rights,” said Margaret Winter, Associate Director of the ACLU National Prison Project. “The remaining segregation policies in South Carolina and Alabama are a remnant of the early days of the HIV epidemic and continue to stigmatize prisoners and inflict them and their families with a tremendous amount of needless suffering.”

Public and correctional health experts agree that there is no medical basis for segregating HIV-positive prisoners within correctional facilities or for limiting access to jobs, vocational training and educational programs available to others.

Since 1987, however, the Mississippi corrections system has performed mandatory HIV tests on all prisoners entering the state prison system, and has permanently housed all male prisoners who test positive in a segregated unit at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, the state’s highest security prison.

As a result, prisoners with HIV have been faced with unjustified isolation, exclusion and marginalization, and low-custody prisoners have been forced unnecessarily to serve their sentences in more violent, more expensive prisons.

The change in policy will enable prisoners with HIV to participate in jobs, training programs and other services to which they were previously denied access because of their HIV status and which are designed to prepare prisoners for a productive return to society.

Prisoners with HIV will now be able to participate in kitchen work, for example, which can be beneficial to them in many ways. Many prisoners worked in kitchens, cafes or restaurants prior to their incarceration, and continued employment in that area can help them upon re-entry into the workforce. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, there is no medical basis for preventing persons with HIV from working in kitchens or other food service employment.

Additionally, prisoners with HIV will no longer be assigned to a segregated HIV unit, which resulted in the public disclosure of their HIV status and left them at risk of being ostracized and subjected to hostility and violence at the hands of other prisoners.

Epps said he will phase in the new desegregation policy gradually for prisoners currently housed in the HIV unit, and will form a committee to make individualized placement decisions for these prisoners. Starting immediately, incoming prisoners will be housed using only criteria set out in the state classification plan such as criminal history, length of sentence and other factors unrelated to their HIV status.

“Prisoners with HIV were often forced to live in cruel, inhumane and degrading conditions, and we’re delighted that Mississippi has changed its policy,” said Megan McLemore, health researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Integrating prisoners with HIV is the norm across the United States and MDOC deserves significant credit for making this decision.”

Additional information about the ACLU National Prison Project is available online at: www.aclu.org/prison

Michel Sidibe, the head of UNAIDS, said “it is unacceptable” that 85 countries still have laws criminalizing same-sex relations among adults, including seven that impose the death penalty for homosexual practices.

He called a proposed Ugandan law that would impose the death penalty for some gays “very unfortunate” and expressed hope it will never be approved.

At a time when UNAIDS is scaling up its program and seeking universal access to HIV treatment, Sidibe said he was “very scared” because bad laws are being introduced by countries making it impossible for these at risk groups to have access to services.

“You have also a growing conservatism which is making me very scared,” Sidibe added.

“We must insist that the rights of the minorities are upheld. If we don’t do that … I think the epidemic will grow again,” he warned. “We cannot accept the tyranny of the majority.”

Sidibe told a group of journalists at a luncheon hosted by the United Nations Foundation that in countries from China to Kenya and Malawi, about 33 percent of new HIV infections are in men having sex with men, a significant increase.

By contrast, he said that in the Caribbean where most countries don’t have repressive laws, only between 3 and 6 percent of HIV infections are in male homosexuals.

Even in the United States, where laws are not restrictive and the gay community was the first to tackle AIDS, Sidibe said it is “shocking” that more than 50 percent of new HIV infections last year occurred among homosexuals. And he said in the 19-25 age bracket the infection rate was even higher.

“It seems like we have come full circle” in the United States, he said. “After almost no cases a few years ago we are seeing again this new peak among people who are not having access to all the information, the protection that is needed.”

In addition to failing to adequately deliver the right messages about AIDS prevention, Sidibe blamed complacency in a new generation that has access to treatment.

He added that this was not just a problem in the U.S. but in Europe and in Africa as well.

Sidibe said drug users are also getting the HIV virus that causes AIDS in high numbers.

“You have 70 percent of new infections occurring in Eastern Europe and Central Asia among drug users, but they are criminalized,” he said. “They don’t have access to services. They have to hide themselves and go underground.”

Of the 16 million people in the world who are injecting drugs, almost 3 million are HIV positive, and among them less than 4 percent have access to treatment and less than 8 percent have access to services, Sidibe said.

“It’s the same for men having sex with men,” he said.

In Nigeria, where there are 1,000 new HIV infections every day, over 30 percent are in vulnerable groups – drug users, sex workers and homosexuals, he said.

Sidibe called for “a prevention revolution” including a campaign in major cities around the world like the anti-smoking campaigns launched in recent years.

Michel Sidibe appealed to government and private donors to keep investing in the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, an international financing institution. He said that cuts in donations will decrease the availability of free or subsidized life-saving drugs to African patients.

An estimated 94 percent of patients on anti-retroviral treatment in Africa count on external donor funds to provide their medications, Sidibe said.

“If we stop now, if we reduce the financing, the people who are on treatment today … we will transform their hope for universal access into a universal nightmare, because they will start dying,” Sidibe told The Associated Press Monday.

In South Africa, 920,000 people are currently receiving anti-retroviral treatment, just over half of the 1.7 million who need the drugs. New policies which will expand the reach of the program announced by South African President Jacob Zuma in December 2009 will also require increased financial resources.

South African Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi said the country’s HIV treatment program is heavily dependent on external donor funding. An estimated 5.7 million South Africans are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, more than any other country.

The Global Fund’s “Results Report”, released Monday, described the substantial advances that have been made in AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria prevention and treatment since the fund’s establishment eight years ago, including the possible elimination of mother-to-child HIV transmission by 2015.

“It is also now possible to imagine a world with no more malaria deaths,” said Michel D. Kazatchkine, the Global Fund’s executive director. In addition, tuberculosis prevalence in many countries is declining, and the Global Fund believes this could be halved by 2015. However, it cautions that the achievement of these goals is only possible if health programs receive increased investments as planned.

The Global Fund will meet in The Hague, Netherlands, on March 24 to examine how it can meet its goals eliminating or reducing instances of the three diseases by 2015. The group will present donor countries with three public health scenarios, based on amounts of funding ranging from $13-20 billion, for the period 2011-2013.

In October this year, the Global Fund will ask donors for financial contributions during its conference in New York. This will be the third time since the fund was established in 2002 that donors are being asked to replenish their finances. There is concern that the global economic downturn could negatively impact the funding commitments made by donor countries.

“The world’s investments are clearly making a difference,” Sidibe said, “but without a fully funded Global Fund, we would be putting the lives of millions of people currently on treatment in jeopardy.”

“Not a single piece of scientific evidence supports the ban,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who joined 16 other Democrats and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in writing Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg.

The lawmakers stressed that the science has changed dramatically since the ban was established in 1983 at the advent of the HIV-AIDS crisis. Today donated blood must undergo two different, highly accurate tests that make the risk of tainted blood entering the blood supply virtually zero, they said.

The senators said that while hospitals and emergency rooms are in urgent need of blood products, “healthy blood donors are turned away every day due to an antiquated policy and our blood supply is not necessarily any safer for it.”

Brian Moulton, chief legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign,the nation’s largest gay rights group, said they are hopeful that the policy, last reviewed in 2006, will change under President Barack Obama, “who is interested in looking at all the policies that have a discriminatory effect.” The goal, he said, is “to have policies in place that are based on the science” rather than “any discriminatory idea about our community.”

The senators’ letter noted that in March 2006, the American Red Cross, America’s Blood Centers and the American Association of Blood Banks reported to an FDA-sponsored workshop that the ban “is medically and scientifically unwarranted.”

The FDA, in a statement, said that “while FDA appreciates concerns about perceived discrimination, our decision to maintain the deferral policy is based on current science and data and does not give weight to a donor’s sexual orientation.”

It said that while some groups favor relaxing restrictions, others, “such as those representing the hemophilia community, support continuation of the current policy.”

People with hemophilia, a bleeding disorder, require periodic transfusions and in the past, before screening techniques were improved to ensure blood was HIV-free, were among those most at risk of contracting the virus.

Kerry compared the effort to lift the blood donation ban to legislation he backed in 2008 to end the law banning people with HIV from traveling and immigrating to the United States. That ban was lifted last year.

Also signing the letter were Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Dick Durbin and Roland Burris of Illinois, Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Mark Udall and Michael Bennet of Colorado, Al Franken of Minnesota, Maria Cantwell of Washington, Carl Levin of Michigan, Tom Harkin of Iowa, and Mark Begich of Alaska.

The United Nations and former President Bill Clinton launched the donation effort Thursday called MassiveGood. It aims to supply low-cost drugs for the developing world, helping medical workers and health officials fight HIV and AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis and improve maternal and children’s health.

Major ticket distributors Amadeus, Travelport and Sabre Holdings Corp. and corporate buyers such as American Express Business Travel and Carlson Wagonlit Travel will offer the donation option to the companies that buy travel through them. The software to process the donations was developed by Amadeus.

Travelers will see the donation option when it’s offered by ticket sellers like Travelocity and some travel agents.

The option will show up like any other choice in buying a ticket, along with adding a car rental or hotel. Tickets sold directly through airline Web sites aren’t part of the program.

“I think this will catch on all over the world. And this is basically an institutionalized version of what we saw happen after the Haiti earthquake, where people were texting in $10, or $5 in Canada, in the automatic systems,” Clinton said. “These systems, I predict, will empower ordinary people to change the future of the world in ways that we can only begin to imagine.”

The money goes to the Geneva-based Millennium Foundation, founded in 2008 to find innovative ways to finance U.N. health goals, and the U.N.-funded UNITAID, an international facility for purchasing drugs hosted by the World Health Organization, also in Geneva.

Some of the money also will go to the Clinton Health Access Initiative and others who provide treatments in poor countries.

Giving what the group calls a “micro-contribution” is optional for everyone involved. The idea for it was raised by Dr. Philippe Douste-Blazy, a cardiologist and former French foreign minister.

Douste-Blazy, who chairs the Millenium Foundation and UNITAID, and is the special financing adviser for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said it builds on the 2006 “microtax” on airplane tickets that 16 nations adopted to help raise more than $1 billion.

“Hundreds of thousands of women, children and men will be able to access the most precious of human rights, the right to health care,” Douste-Blazy said, calling the donation effort a “great citizen movement around the world.”

Ban called it a simple idea that would be expanded to European nations, then elsewhere. “We hope MassiveGood will be become a truly global phenomenon,” he said.

Each year, people at the drive ask me whether I’m donating, and I tell them, “No, I can’t.” I don’t meet the eligibility requirements, which state that a person must weight at least 110 pounds.

That requirement exists to protect me, the donor.

There are other requirements, most of them mandated by federal regulation and said to exist to protect a recipient of donated blood. One of those requirements, the ban against gay and bisexual men donating blood, is antiquated. And it is harmful to the men turned away and for a medical system that relies heavily on donor supply.

In 1985, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration instituted a rule banning any man who has had sex with other man from donating blood since 1977. That’s a lifetime ban, regardless of HIV status, regardless of one’s relationship status, regardless of one’s frequency of sexual activity or the believed exposure risk in the sexual activity.

In late February, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis released “A Drive for Change: Reforming U.S. Blood Policies,” which offers a history of the rule, efforts to change the rule and an analysis of its impact.

In 1985, when the rule was enacted, it was a response to a virus that doctors and researchers knew little about or certainly not enough about, a virus that was relatively new and frightening and proving deadly. The rule was, in those early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, a public health effort to protect patients refusing blood transfusions from contracting HIV.

But much has changed since then with regard to HIV and AIDS, and advances in the screening of blood supplies make the chance of receiving a unit of HIV infected blood one in 1.5 million, according to GMHC. All blood is tested after donation — the labs don’t rely on a donor’s response to a 48-question questionnaire.

So what does that mean?

That means federal authorities have decided it is OK for a heterosexual person who engaged in sexual activity with an HIV-positive person 366 days ago to donate blood today.

That means that a man who paid a woman for sex a year ago can donate blood today, just as a woman who paid a man for sex a year ago can donate — provided she’s 110 pounds or more.

But authorities resist lifting the ban against a gay donor, even if he last engaged in sexual activity with an HIV-negative man 3,666 days ago or 7,320 days ago.

GHMC last week called for change — not its first call — with its 51-page report that presents a convincing argument that the only reason the rule remains is because of a bias against gay and bisexual men.

“It is time for the FDA to join the growing consensus favoring reform of blood donation policies for gay and bisexual men, and implement reforms that allow gay and bisexual men to donate blood while improving the overall safety of the American blood supply,” the report states.

GHMC proposed a framework for reforming donor policy that it summarized as DONATE:

• Decreased risk to blood donation recipients of accidental HIV transmission.

• Objective risk factors as primary basis for blood donor policies.

• Non-discriminatory impact on gay/bisexual men and other groups.

• Awareness-raising of HIV prevention and transmission risks.

• Technology-driven donor screening and blood screening procedures.

• Expansion of safe, eligible blood donor pool.

With this framework, with a different administration and with calls for change coming from HIV specialists, public health experts and a number of organizations that exist to respond to public crisis (including the influential American Red Cross), maybe change is ahead, perhaps a lifetime ban will be no more.

In 2011 — 2010 seems too soon for government action — maybe I’ll walk into the hall where the Islandwide Blood Drive takes place to interview donors. And maybe to the first person who asks me, “Are you donating?” I’ll reply, “I can’t. Don’t weigh enough. But my gay buddy here has his sleeve rolled up.”

Then again, I’ll be another year closer to 50, and maybe exceeding that 110-pound minimum. So …

Brian Williams of the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modeling and Analysis believes that by testing every person at risk of HIV/AIDS and prescribing anti-retroviral treatment (ART) for all patients with HIV will stop the spread of new infections in five years. In the next few decades, Williams believes the treatment will wipe out the epidemic.

“Our immediate best hope is to use ART not only to save lives but also to reduce transmission of HIV. I believe if we used ART drugs we could effectively stop transmission of HIV within five years,” Dr Williams said. “It may be possible to stop HIV transmission and halve AIDS-related TB within 10 years and eliminate both infections within 40 years,” he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego, California, according to an article in The Independent.

Using anti-retroviral treatment “dramatically lower the concentration of HIV within a person’s bloodstream,” according to the article. It protects patients from AIDS and reduces the ability to spread the virus to other people.

“The problem is that we are using the drugs to save lives, but we are not using them to stop transmission,” Williams said. “The concentration of the virus drops 10,000 times [with ART] … This probably translates into a 25-fold reduction in infectiousness. But if you did this it would be enough essentially to stop transmission.”

• Retarded for me, not for thee: Dear former Gov. Palin:  please treat us like adults. Just admit you give “Rushie” Limbaugh a pass on the word “retarded” because he’s an ally. Anything else you spout is moose manure.

• RIP Brendan Burke: The youngest son of Maple Leafs’ GM Brian Burke, died in a car accident on Friday. The father and son received recent media attention when Brendan publicly came out.

• DADT News: Read the Military Times today. It has a survey showing that troop opposition to gays and lesbians serving openly has sharply decreased since 2004. Twenty bucks says Sen. John McCain will never cite this study.

• Reason 639 to support Gillibrand: Unless you are a Log Cabin Republican, it’s time to get behind New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand with money and volunteer time. At this weekend’s Human Rights Campaign dinner, she announced her plan to offer an amendment to defund DADT. She’s carried our water. Time for us to do the same for her.

• Everything is going to be okay. Sade has a new album: After 10 years, Sade is returning with new tunes. Please forgive as I do the dance of joy.

• New additions: There are 24 new members to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA). Rosie Perez and Phil Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute, are part of the incoming group.

• Who dat on Bourbon Street: If you have money, take your butt to New Orleans this week. The Saints marched into the  Super Bowl and Mardi Gras is around the corner. Get your party on Big Easy!

And with more than 120,000 people in the country infected with HIV or AIDS, access to antiretroviral treatments is difficult – even in ideal circumstances.

“Here in Haiti, more than 2 percent of the adult population lives with the virus, and hundreds more are infected every year,” wrote Craig Kielburger, a Vancouver Sun columnist and founder of Free the Children who traveled in Haiti on Jan. 16 to offer food and medical aid. “Due to the extreme poverty and lack of medical access at the best of times, mother-to-child transmission through breastfeeding or at birth is quite common.”

Several corporations and aid groups have taken up the cause and are making concerted efforts to help rebuild Haiti’s devastated health care system and provide supplies to those infected with HIV/AIDS.

Abbott Laboratories, a global health care company and pharmaceutical provider, initially offered $1 million in humanitarian aid. This week, the company more than doubled their donation, providing $2.5 million in funding and pharmaceutical products.

“The recent earthquake has had a devastating impact on Haiti’s limited health care system, which was already facing significant challenges,” said Catherine V. Babington, president of the Abbott Fund in a news release. “Building on our existing partnerships with humanitarian organizations in Haiti, we are providing funding and product donations to help address the immense and immediate health needs.”

The release notes that Abbott and the Abbott Fund have provided more than $34 million in grants and product donations since 2007 to help address health needs in Haiti, including maternal and child health, diabetes, HIV/AIDS and malnutrition.

New York-based Aid for AIDS is also coordinating an effort to help HIV-infected Haitians by collecting unused medications to treat the virus. In addition to collecting life-saving antiretroviral drugs, Aid for AIDS is also amassing medications including antibiotics, antivirals, antiallergics and antiparasite medications to treat infections associated with the virus.

Liliana Velaquez, marketing and communications coordinator for the group, said Aid for AIDS is working on sending their third shipment of medications this weekend.

“Many people are responding to the call,” she said.

The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission is also lending a hand. The group raised more than $10,000 in the past week, the majority of which is going to SEROvie, a Haitian group that provides support to predominantly gay, HIV-infected men. At the time the earthquake struck, a support group was in progress at SEROvie’s office in Port-au-Prince  – 14 men died as the walls of the building crumbled, said Sara Perle, communications director of IGLHRC.

“Now, they are providing support for the beneficiaries sort of out of their back yard,” said Perle.

A portion of the IGLHRC funds raised will also be sent to Collectiva Mujer y Salud, a human rights organization based in the neighboring Dominican Republic.

Gilead said the regimen of two experimental drugs called elvitegravir and GS 9350, as well as the combination drug Truvada, is meeting its main goal in the study. The combination was about as effective at reducing virus levels as Gilead’s drug Atripla, which contains three medications.

The trial is scheduled to last 48 weeks, and Gilead said the “Quad” regimen met its goal at 24 weeks of treatment. The drugs are being tested on 71 people with HIV who have not taken another anti-retroviral treatment.

Elvitegravir is an integrase inhibitor, meaning it blocks the enzyme integrase, which the is one of the types of enzymes the AIDS virus uses to reproduce and infect cells. GS 9350 is designed to boost blood levels of medicines like elvitegravir.

Truvada made up of emtricitabine and tenofovir, and Atripla consists of those two drugs plus a third, efavirenz. Those drugs have already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Gilead said full results from the study will be submitted for presentation at a scientific meeting in the next few months.

In morning trading, Gilead shares rose $1.49, or 3.4 percent, to $44.75.