Case Commentary On Lucy R. D'souza Vs State Of Goa And Others 1989 SCC ONLINE BOM 278

Abstract

In the year 1981, a rare form of pneumonia and cancer began to spread among gay men. At that time, the disease was thus called Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID) because it only affected gay men. Later, in July 1982, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention renamed the disease acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) after determining that it was not confined to any single group; the virus later identified as its cause, HIV, was not isolated until 1983.[1] In the year 1985, the first conference on AIDS was held in Georgia, USA. [2] By September 1982, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had already documented five hundred and ninety three cases of the syndrome within the country, a figure that illustrates how quickly the disease was spreading even before its causes were fully understood. This uncertainty shaped much of the early legislative and administrative response to the epidemic, including the isolation based measures that were later adopted in India.[3] Gradually, it began to spread globally, and finally, it also reached India. In India. The first case of AIDS was recorded in 1986 among female sex workers in Chennai was an HIV infection.[4] This discovery followed a deliberate research effort by Dr Suniti Solomon and her student Sellappan Nirmala, who tested blood samples collected from women at a state run home in Chennai after Solomon had followed international reports on the emerging epidemic. Six of the hundred samples tested positive, a result later confirmed through independent testing at Johns Hopkins University, thereby establishing that HIV had reached India.[5] It was here at this moment that people started getting scared of this disease. It was a moment of fear regarding public health. Authorities were now starting to use debate and were more aware of the situation. They were considering taking coercive measures. Then, some good luck came in Goa with the Goa Public Health Act of 1985, which included provisions for dealing with such contagious diseases as HIV and AIDS. Later, in 1987, the Goa Public Health Amendment Act inserted Section 47 as a list of infectious diseases. As per Section 53, it also gave the authorities the power to isolate any person who tested positive for AIDS. Thus, this was a kind of legal power that the authorities were given to segregate AIDS-infected individuals from the general population. It is worth noting that Goa's approach remained an outlier within the country, since no other Indian state enacted a comparable isolation provision during this period. Commentators reviewing the litigation have observed that the absence of a uniform national policy on HIV left individual states to devise their own, often inconsistent, responses to the epidemic, of which Goa's mandatory isolation regime was the most stringent.[6] And due to such a rule, forced segregation of people from the general population came into effect and started violating their general legal and constitutional rights. This led to the case of Lucy R. D'Souza vs. the State of Goa and others coming into the picture. This case was among the first cases of HIV and AIDS being heard in the Indian courts.