Sabin Russell, Chronicle Medical Writer
(12-05) 17:05 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- One year after the Bush Administration promised to streamline a process to allow people with HIV infection to visit the United States despite congressionally mandated travel ban, critics are saying that the proposed new rules are more restrictive than the old ones.
Laws dating back to the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the United States forbid issuance of visas to foreigners infected with HIV, but allow exceptions through a cumbersome waiver process that has been denounced as slow, arbitrary and unfair. In December 2006, President Bush asked for new administrative rules to speed up the granting of such waivers.
Opportunities for the public to comment on the regulations, which took 11 months to craft, expire Thursday and opponents are using the deadline to criticize the suggested changes as well as the entire notion that people infected with the AIDS virus needed special visas to visit the country.
Dr. Paul Volberding, chief of Medicine at the VA Medical Center in San Francisco and an adviser to Physicians for Human Rights, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based advocacy group, contends the new regulations may be more discriminatory than the current rules. "Our citizens travel to other countries for pleasure and business without restrictions," he said. "But we erect barriers against those from other countries for a chronic, treatable disease that is not casually spread."
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