High court should preserve HIV-assault law in Ohio

Is Ohio’s state law requiring HIV-positive individuals to disclose that status to a partner before engaging in any sexual activity a relic from the Dark Ages of the AIDS crisis in America?

Yes, it most certainly is, argue attorneys for Orlando Batista in their appeal before the Ohio Supreme Court. Batista is serving an eight-year prison term, after having been convicted in Hamilton County in July 2014 for having sex with his girlfriend without telling her he’s HIV positive and after having admitted he also had knowingly infected at least two other women, one of whom passed the virus onto her child.

His defense contends the law violates free-speech rights and is based on outmoded stigmas associated with the human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immune deficiency syndrome and fails to recognize dramatically improved survival rates in recent years.

We respectfully disagree and urge the state’s high court to keep the statute – Ohio Revised Code Section 2903.11 – on the books.

The Ohio Attorney General’s Office justifies the law as an informed-consent measure. In defending the law before the high court, Atty. Samuel Peterson said, “It is a recognition that when you have sexual conduct, there are two partners to that conduct and the other person has a right to know [HIV or AIDS status] and has a right to be party to the decision to engage in sexual contact.”

Such consent is particularly crucial given the potential adverse ramifications of nondisclosure. Though contracting HIV no longer translates into an automatic death sentence because of new retroviral drug treatments and therapies, left unchecked the virus still can advance to full-blown AIDS, for which death rates are considerably higher.

ILL EFFECTS OF HIV LINGER

And even though the quantity of life for many HIV-infected individuals has lengthened, the quality of life for many of them often is diminished. In addition to the high costs of such treatments, side effects linked to HIV include accelerated aging, cognitive impairment, inflamation-related complications, lipid-level effects and an increased propensity for cancer.

From a legal perspective, precedents support maintaining the premise of Ohio’s HIV-assault law and those of about two dozen other states. In Texas, for example, courts have ruled that the fluids of a man living with HIV may constitute a “deadly weapon.”

What’s more, though the HIV epidemic has slowed over the past decade, it remains a potentially fatal disease for which there is no cure. It continues to strike and kill tens of thousands of Americans each year. Some population groups are registering increases in infection rates among the 1.2 million Americans living with HIV or AIDS.

In Ohio, newly reported cases of HIV infection are on the rise, increasing from 937 in 2015 to 982 in 2016, according to new data from the Ohio Department of Health. Mahoning County, with 470 people living with HIV and 225 with AIDS, logged the sixth highest rate of infections among all 88 counties last year, the ODH data show.

Clearly, then, though the meteoric rise in infections has subsided, HIV and AIDS still remain grave public health threats in our community, our state and our nation. As such, any and all preventive measures – including laws designed to safeguard Ohioans from potential exposure – merit preservation.