Loose cannon : Robert Kirby
In a quick-draw response to an opinion expressed in this column some four weeks ago, Anita Kleinsmidt of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies – hereinafter referred to as “Cals” – dances intrepidly to the defence of the rights of nannies – hereinafter referred to as “childminders”. In the column I said that parents should have the right to test childminders for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus – hereinafter referred to as “the HIV”.
According to Ms Kleinsmidt testing childminders for the HIV would be illegal and would violate their rights. I quote directly from Ms Kleinsmidt’s letter to the M&G (12th to 18th February). “The Labour Relations Act prohibits discrimination on arbitrary grounds. Testing a childminder for [the] HIV and then presumably dismissing him/her would constitute an unfair dismissal in terms of the Act.”
I have no reason to doubt Ms Kleinsmidt’s reading of the Labour Relations Act – a great deal of its substance was stir-fried in the mighty Cals wok – but where I take issue is with her assertion that “presumably” a childminder who tested positive with the HIV would be fired. In a rhapsodic display of humanist reverie Kleinsmidt argues that people with the HIV “usually have many years of healthy working life before they fall prey to opportunistic illnesses caused by the immunosuppression. It would seem grossly unfair to deny them the right to be productive members of society while they are still healthy because of fears which have no scientific basis.”
I did not suggest that anyone should be fired nor did I imply this. Ms Kleinsmidt’s assumption merely reinforces my belief that specialist-liberals of her phylum often ascribe the darkest of motives to those with whom they disagree.
Lest this point is too oblique for Ms Kleinsmidt to grasp, all I was saying is that the parents of any child have the right to know whether the person looking after their child on a regular basis has a communicable disease – in this instance a fatal one. What’s more, no matter how you drape the matter in melodramatic verbiage, a person infected with the HIV is not, in any acceptable sense, “healthy”.
Should they find out their childminder is HIV positive, parents have the entirely reasonable option of taking the necessary precautions. Far from automatic dismissal of a childminder carrying the HIV, some employers might well go out of their way to help. If necessary the childminder could be counselled on precautions, on her or his own inevitable health crises. If indeed the childminder was somewhere in the quiescent but infective limbo of any communicable disease, parents have the right to know. Since Ms Kleinsmidt burbles on about “scientific basis”, what about the matter of sub-clinical reactivating tuberculosis, strongly associated with the HIV infection in its earliest stages? Or does she believe that since one disease is harder to catch than another it’s okay to keep silent about it?
In her enthusiasm Ms Kleinsmidt believes that constitutional rights of children to be protected from possible infection are subdued by the provisions of the Labour Relations or the Employment Equity Acts. What then of the reverse situation? What if the child has the HIV? Would this guilty secret be something to be kept at all costs from the childminder? Or do the Cals ethical guidelines run in only one direction? If the childminder caught the HIV from the child we can be sure the Labour Relations Act would be the first place the childminder would seek legal remedy.
And what Ms Kleinsmidt might also ponder is the high probability that the HIV-infected childminder contracted the virus because he or she was not warned by an HIV-positive sexual partner.
This reply to Ms Kleinsmidt is not written with any sense of retaliation – her letter requires no help in being fatuous – but rather because, like many others, she again develops the ludicrous and dangerous notion that the HIV/Aids problem is best resolved in committee. What her letter reveals is the extraordinary myth which surrounds the HIV. It seems to have become a fashionable “designer pestilence”; those who have contracted it deserve some, if uncategorised, certainly strongly implied extra protection.
All incurably fatal diseases are grievous. And the only way they will ever be contained is by a mixture of understanding, medical advice – and precaution. The more that the HIV and Aids are camouflaged the more distorted, the more hysterically uninformed will be the general public’s reaction to them. What will never help is politically correct maundering and conspiratorial silence.