Sex and Drugs (But Not Rock and Roll): The Variation in HIV-Related Restrictions on the Entry, Stay, and Residence of Seropositive Foreigners in the Middle East and North Africa.

This paper considers the variation in entry, stay, and residence travel restrictions for people living with HIV/AIDS in the World Health Organization's Eastern Mediterranean region and the wider Muslim world. If these travel restrictions are associated with human rights violations, why do some countries maintain restrictions while others repeal them? In particular, why do countries with a secular governmental regime like Egypt maintain restrictions, while non-secular countries like Iran do not? We argue that in the Eastern Mediterranean region this variation is explained not by the characteristics of a country's particular form of Islam, its level of development, or its adherence to human rights norms, but by the characteristics of the epidemic in a given country. Countries in which the main mode of transmission is sex maintain restrictions because of stigma associated with sex outside marriage in Islam. Countries in which the main mode of transmission is injecting drug use are less likely to maintain restrictions because of Islam's more lenient approach towards drugs. Using firth logistic regression, we show that this holds for countries in the Eastern Mediterranean, but not for Muslim countries globally. We discuss possible reasons for this and the implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]