Materia Medica Malaysiana

Noh Suggests Allowing Doctors To Disclose HIV Patients' Illness To Spouse

BALING, May 5 (Bernama) -- Internal Security Deputy Minister Datuk Noh Omar, Thursday suggested that the Health Ministry looked into the medical ethics relating to HIV/AIDS to allow doctors to disclose a patient's illness to his or her spouse.
He said doctors, for example, should be allowed to tell the wife of a HIV patient about his infection so that she could take preventive measures to avoid contracting the disease herself.
At the moment, he said, doctors were bound by their ethics not to disclose their patients' illness without their consent, but he feared that HIV patients would keep their condition secret from their spouses.
"If a HIV patient keeps his illness secret, he would be endangering his spouse as the disease could be spread through sexual contact," he told a media conference after launching a campaign against drugs and illegal racing organised by the 4B Youth movement here.
"I am making this suggestion to prevent the innocent from becoming victims," he said.
Noh, however, said 75 per cent of the HIV/AIDS patients contracted the disease through drug abuse by sharing needles.
In an immediate response to the suggestion, Health Minister Datuk Dr Chua Soi Lek said he personally felt that people suffering from HIV/AIDS who knew they had the disease but still donated blood or had sex which could infect someone else should be considered to have committed an offence.
He said the ministry had discussed the matter in view of the expected rise in HIV patients to 300,000 in 2015 from the present 160,000.