Editor’s Note: Papua, New Guinea supports a bill to implant HIV/AIDS patients with microchips so they can be tracked, monitored and punished for intentionally infecting others. Niniek Karmini of The Associated Press in Jakarta, Indonesia reports. –RA
Lawmakers in Indonesia’s remote province of Papua have thrown their support behind a controversial bill requiring some HIV/AIDS patients to be implanted with microchips – part of extreme efforts to monitor the disease.
Health workers and rights activists sharply criticized the plan Monday.
But legislator John Manangsang said by implanting small computer chips beneath the skin of “sexually aggressive” patients, authorities would be in a better position to identify, track and ultimately punish those who deliberately infect others with up to six months in jail or a $5,000 fine.
The technical and practical details still need to be hammered out, he and others said, but the proposed legislation has received full backing from the provincial parliament and, if it gets a majority vote as expected, will be enacted next month.
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Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country and has one of Asia’s fastest growing HIV rates, with up to 290,000 infections out of 235 million people, fueled mainly by intravenous drug users and prostitution.
But Papua, the country’s easternmost and poorest province, has been hardest hit. Its case rate of almost 61 per 100,000 is 15 times the national average, according to internationally funded research, which blames lack of knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases.
“The health situation is extraordinary, so we have to take extraordinary action,” said another lawmaker, Weynand Watari, who envisions radio frequency identification tags like those used to track everything from cattle to luggage.
A committee would be created to determine who should be fitted with chips and to monitor patients’ behavior, but it remains unclear who would be on it and how they would carry out their work, lawmakers said Monday.
Health workers and rights activists called the plan “abhorrent.”
“People with AIDS aren’t animals; we have to respect their rights,” said Tahi Ganyang Butarbutar, a prominent activist in Papua.
He said the best way to tackle the epidemic was through increased spending on sexual education and condom use.
Does everyone know that USA passports are now microchipped? Check out RFID technology; and then decide why they need to have a chip in your actual passport.
No, no, no, no chip, please.
There was some New Jersey woman who volunteered to have chips embedded in her whole family as some sort of safety measure experiment after 911. Blindly their fear walked the family like sheep to the slaughter. And there she was on national TV touting the importance of this to citizen safety.
My bible toting acquaintenances liken this chip mentality to the mark of the beast where no one will be able to participate in commerce without it.
If this whole thinking gains, I am hoping that our computer geeks and hackers are willing and ready to make sure it doesn’t work.
I like crystals, don’t know much about them except when I acquire and work with it. But I know there is power there. I have a little handbook reference on them and the author states in the preface that the fall of Atlantis was due to the misuse of the crystal. We are seeing that manifest in the use of the silicon chip in so many technologically wounding ways.
I think we all need to question the use of the technology we create and employ. What is our participation in the technology doing.
Another recent example that I have heard of is Verizon’s computer tracking of employee breaks. They are allowed nine minutes of bathroom time. Can you imagine being at your performance review and the boss brings up your bathroom records and having to say well, that was the Packer Bears game week and I ate too much cheese dip at the party and had some trouble with my bowels that week. Or since I lost my loved one, I sometimes just start crying for no reason, and I use the restroom to do that so that I don’t disrupt the workers around me.
Science can be cool and those researchers are having a great time exploring and finding. It is what we use that technology for that can wound.