Public pressure from the 33+ Caribbean activist groups, including gay rights entities, has led to Jamaican Professor Brendan Bain being terminated from the University of the West Indies. The organizations contended that his expert evidence in the controversial UNIBAM challenge in the Supreme Court of Belize was "anti-gay".
As we told you last night, Bain was the director of the Caribbean HIV/AIDS Regional Training (CHART) Initiative. He was respected as one of the Caribbean's foremost experts in s a pioneer in clinical infectious disease practice in the Caribbean and a leading medical authority on the HIV epidemic in the region. That all came to an end when the gay rights lobby groups found out that in August of 2012 he gave expert evidence in the Caleb Orozco/UNIBAM Challenge to Belize's Criminal Code in trying to get the sodomy laws repealed.
In his deposition, he noted that some public health practitioners and agencies have hypothesized that decriminalizing the practice of anal sex among consenting adults would lead a reduction in the incidents of HIV infections among men having sex with men.
Those comments didn't sit well with the Gay Rights advocacy groups in the Caribbean, and after the public pressure, the University of the West Indies agreed that as the head of the CHART initiative, Bain lost the trust of the stakeholders who most benefit from the programme.
In a release sent to the press today, UWI announced the decision to terminate him. The administration said it is their belief that since he has been compromised, quote, "The University of the West Indies has decided to terminate the contract of Professor Bain as Director of the Regional Coordinating Unit (RCU) of the Caribbean HIV/Training (CHART) Network."
But, there are still some lingering controversies from the position put forward by Bain. Our colleagues from Nationwide News in Jamaica got a chance to speak with Dr. Chris Beyrer, who says that Bain may have misused or misinterpreted his research on the status of the amount of HIV infections in Men who have sex with men. Here's what he had to say:
Professor Chris Beyrer, researcher - John's Hopkins University
"In 2012 we did a global review of the epidemiology and risks for HIV among men who have sex with men. We did that trying to harvest and analyze essentially all of the available global HIV prevalence data that had been reported through that time for the British journal. We published that in July of 2012 and it was presented in a special session at the international AIDS conference in Washington DC which I co-chaired with Richard, the editor in chief. We did in deed find that HIV rates were unfortunately quite high among men who have sex with men globally. That was through develop and developing countries and it was through in places that have relatively low HIV rates in the general population, but also in regions like sub-Saharan Africa where HIV is of course much more common among reproductive age adults. The issue with the way some have miss-interpreted those data or miss-use those data first of all to say that this is inherently related to for example issues like whether or not homosexuality is legal or not. So for example the two regions with the highest rates of HIV infection among men who have sex with men were I am sorry to say the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa."
Dr. Beyrer is a professor at John's Hopkin's University. He's also the director of the University's Fogarty AIDS International Training and Research Program, and the director of University's Center for Public Health & Human rights.
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