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Hello, this is Miguel Gomez with AIDS.gov at the Vienna International AIDS Conference.
There was just a press conference on the travel restrictions.
Gentlemen, could you introduce yourselves and tell us your sort of the key points that you shared during the press conference,
and could we start with our guest from China, sir?
Thank you. Well the travel restrictions have now been lifted for a couple of months, since April 27th.
And of course, the main point we were just trying to make, is you need a political will and political leadership
to guide the country out of what has been a clearly very difficult and awkward, increasingly awkward policy, for the last almost twenty years.
When you remove that barrier the world gets a little bit smaller.
Why thank you, and sir?
I’m Dr. Howard Koh, Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In the United States, the travel ban was instituted in 1987 and since then we’ve learned so much about causes *** and how it’s transmitted.
We know it’s not caused by casual contact, we know it’s not like diseases, for example tuberculosis, that’s easily communicable.
So, for these reasons in January of 2010, the travel ban was formally lifted.
And, we had an announcement put forward, by both
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius,
at a press conference at the White House to announce that.
So, with the lifting of the ban, the United States can now sponsor the upcoming 2012 International AIDS Conference in Washington, DC.
So we are very proud to have made that announcement.
Gentlemen, thank you for your time. And this is Miguel Gomez, with AIDS.gov.