The Globe and Mail: Saudis jail, deport foreigners with HIV: "Mohammed spends his days in a crowded cage, dying of a treatable disease for which the richest country in the Middle East won't provide medicines.
The Palestinian is HIV positive and has been kept in a cell at the King Saud Hospital for Infectious Diseases for three months, along with two roommates who also are infected with the virus. They live behind a brown steel door with barred windows, victims of a closed society that would rather deport people, such as Mohammed, than talk about sex, drug use or AIDS."...
"We are prisoners here. They treat us like animals," Mohammed said during a short discussion of his circumstances through the bars of his cage before hospital security guards arrived and ended the interview....
The country views AIDS as an imported phenomenon, and in a 2004 report the Ministry of Health said Saudi Arabia's policy for dealing with foreigners with AIDS is to treat them until they are stable enough to be deported.
The low number of AIDS cases in the country is frequently attributed to the kingdom's strict Islamic laws, which prohibit premarital sex, relations outside marriage and homosexuality. Penalties for adultery and drug use include imprisonment, public stoning or beheading...
Many of those who end up at the King Saud hospital work in the country for years beforehand and only discover they have AIDS when they're brought to hospital after a workplace or traffic accident. There, they receive a mandatory HIV test. After that, they're forcibly taken to hospital and confined there to await deportation or death, whichever comes first...
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