Rodney Rousseau recently approached PositiveLite.com to tell his story, a story of a university professor who he feels is providing misleading information about the HIV epidemic and that in doing so, charges Rousseau, “he was perpetuating so much of the stigma that exists in our society.”
Rousseau provided PositiveLite.com with audio recordings of the lectures involved. Here is an except - what his professor said about HIV transmission . . .
“The guy will have a resistant strain, or resistant strains, of the virus to most of the drugs which are available; then he will sleep with his boyfriend, which is, as we call it, men sleeping with men, MSM, and then give his boyfriend the best gift, give him a strain of the virus, which is resistant to all the drugs. That’s what he has, that’s what it is, that’s probably 90 percent, 90 percent . . . HIV has millions of people, 90 percent from homosexual.”
We asked the subject of Rousseau’s allegations, Dr Mounir AbouHaidar, for comment but he did not respond.
Rodney Rousseau is a 25 year old gay man who was diagnosed HIV-positive in July, 2013. He grew up in Northwestern Ontario. He is a 4th year student in Biochemistry and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.
Rousseau has tailored various elements of his academic career to specifically inform his interest and passion for HIV work, including an HIV and Behaviour Project he is currently spearheading as an undergraduate research project he hopes to present at the International AIDS Conference in 2014. He is pursiing a career in HIV immunology research. He is the Co-President of the Sexual Diversity Studies Student Union at U of T. Rodney has worked and volunteered with various AIDS Service Organizations for over five years.
Here is our interview.
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Bob Leahy: Rodney, you’ve told us you feel that one of your professors has repeatedly given false, misleading, and/or just blatantly stigmatizing information about HIV and gay men. Do you want to talk about this? What course is this in which this has happened?
Rodney Rousseau Sure, I’d be happy to share, Bob. It’s a third year cell biology class at U of T that specifically focuses on viruses. Over the course of the semester my professor has been making both stigmatizing statements, as well as just clearly misinformed statements. As part of his lecture he’s advised students not to sleep with someone who has HIV, and made untrue generalizations including that about 90% of HIV in the west is homosexually transmitted. This information contradicts the data that the Public Health Agency of Canada puts out. He also, on December third, chose to frame the issue of HIV drug resistance within the gay context of a guy giving his boyfriend “the best gift of ever”, which was the first time he’d used the term boyfriend when talking about the partner of a male person.
And the professor’s name is?
His name is Mounir AbouHaidar (left).
So what has he said to your class about the issue of sleeping with people living with HIV?
He told them not to. He told them that if they did they’d get a chronic infection.
When did this occur?
This was on September 19th of this year (2013).
Do you have proof, Rodney?
Yes. He allows us to audio-record the lectures, so I have copies.
I see. Now as a person living with HIV how did this make you feel. Do you feel it is appropriate?
To be honest, it makes me feel a ton of different ways. Disappointed, sad, angry, and alone. I definitely don’t think it’s appropriate for him to be making these sorts of statements. First of all, it isn’t his area of expertise. He doesn’t have formal education in public health issues or anything remotely related to the statements he’s been making. This is especially problematic because when a full professor in a university says things in a lecture hall, students take it to be true. Now we’ve got about 300 students in his class with a reaffirmed notion that sexual serosorting is somehow going to protect them from HIV. These statements are also just inappropriate because they’re based on the assumption that there are no HIV-positive students in the class. Who is he to tell me not to sleep with someone who has HIV? How am I supposed to feel that he just told all of these people not to sleep with me?
Well, did you challenge him?
I raised my hand in class after Dr. AbouHaidar made the statement about HIV was 90% homosexually transmitted, and told him that that was misinformation. He partially corrected himself by saying he wasn’t talking about Africa, just North America and Western Europe. This was also when he took the opportunity to bring up drug use as the only other real risk activity.
Any reaction from other students to his statement?
This is probably the most disheartening part about the entire experience. Mostly the other students in the class just sat there apathetically. Nobody else seemed offended when he was telling them not to sleep with people with HIV, and definitely nobody else tried to correct him for giving misinformation. Then specifically the time when he contextualized viral drug resistance in the frame of gay "gift-giving", a clear percentage of the class actually laughed. They laughed. I sat there offended and nearly in tears while other students laughed. It was terrible.
You mention he made a reference to transmission as "a gift" that gay men give to others. Do you want to elaborate?
Well, that’s exactly what he did. Without needing to, he chose to bring up gay men in the context of viral transmission. If he had just made the statement that gay men are disproportionately overrepresented in HIV infection, I would have said ‘great, he’s recognizing that there are social determinants to health outcomes’. But that isn’t what he did. He chose to start talking about gay men as a group of people that give to their boyfriends the greatest gift of ever, a drug-resistant strain of HIV. I don’t know anyone that would call that the greatest gift of ever. That statement was clearly attempting to subjugate gay men as a group, and carried a certain feeling of scapegoating.
Again, how did this make you feel and did you challenge him and why?
I felt like he was perpetuating so much of the stigma that exists in our society. These false notions are exactly what is fuelling this epidemic. I did challenge him and tried to have him correct what he had said. I did this because I feel like there is an immense responsibility for education about HIV to not do more harm than good. He’s teaching people about viruses, including HIV, but he’s failing to recognize that the misinformed, false, and stigmatizing statements he’s making about people with HIV are doing an immense amount of harm. He’s educating some of the brightest minds in this country, people that will become doctors and scientists, and along the way they’re having their perception of HIV shaped by this professor who’s teaching them to serosort and to not worry about HIV if they’re not gay, because it’s 90% a homosexual issue anyway. It’s just terrible, I needed to challenge it.
What was his reaction when you challenged him?
He dismissed me. He said that he’s not the person that makes the statistics or writes those papers, he just reads them. Papers that I’m pretty curious about, because I’ve never read anything reputable with the numbers he’s throwing around. Like I said, he half-corrected himself, saying that HIV is only 90% a homosexual issue in North America and Western Europe, but not Africa.
Does her ever refer to other groups or acknowledge that HIV also occurs in women?
He has acknowledged that HIV can be heterosexually transmitted in Africa. So, I guess that counts as women being able to contract the virus. I personally don’t believe it’s sufficient, nor is it even complete information because there are, of course, many women with HIV in Canada. But anytime he is speaking about a person with HIV he only ever uses the male pronoun ‘he’. Like I mentioned he also talked about drug users as a risk group, but in that instance he actually referred to them as “drug guys”, so again he didn’t really acknowledge this group can include women.
Let me ask you, how well informed do you think Professor AbouHaidar is on the subject of HIV/AIDS?
I think HIV and AIDS is a complex issue that requires knowledge at many different levels. I believe that Professor AbouHaidar is brilliant when it comes to molecular and cellular understandings of HIV. That said, I believe he has a complete lack of social and public health knowledge about HIV. He doesn’t understand social determinants of health, and clearly just doesn’t have accurate epidemiological information.
Why does this worry you particularly?
What he’s saying in his class is actually fuelling this epidemic. It’s not fair to the students to be receiving misinformation about HIV, and it’s especially not fair to those of us living with HIV who are having academic professionals ‘teach’ their students not to have sex with us. HIV is not 90% homosexually transmitted, and depending how much other knowledge about HIV these students have, this information may actually be increasing their potential for viral exposure.
Do other students know you are HIV-positive, Rodney? Does he? And if so what has been the reaction to your status generally?
Some students in the class know I’m living with HIV. I came out to them about my status recently, and the response was mostly supportive, at least to my face. Professor AbouHaidar doesn’t know (or at least didn’t at the time of making these statements) that I’m living with HIV. I’m choosing to live very openly with my status, and have mostly enjoyed a welcoming response to the people I’ve disclosed to.
What do you think is the attitude of students generally to HIV? Are they knowledgeable in a way that makes them able to challenge Professor Abouhaidar on his facts?
I think that most students think HIV is someone else’s problem. There is almost no voice on campus affirming that HIV affects all of us, including U of T students. I would say, at least in my science classes, most students don’t know very much about epidemiology of HIV, or about HIV stigma, discrimination, etc.
OK. Why are you coming to the press with these allegations?
I want to create a conversation. The experience of HIV stigma is huge for those of us living with HIV. Most of us already have to experience this stigma through rejection and the impact it carries in our relationships with friends and family. We don’t need entitled and misinformed professors to reproduce this stigma. Stigma that has the effect of hindering people who don’t know their status from getting tested. Stigma that decreases the quality of life for those of us living with the virus. We need to have a conversation about why this isn’t okay, and how what he’s doing is actually making this epidemic worse.
And have you also lodged a complaint with the university and if so where does that stand?
Yes, I’ve had a meeting with the associate chair of the department as well as the vice dean of the faculty. They’re going to be interviewing Professor AbouHaidar about what he’s said, and then they’ve assured me that they’ll get back to me about whatever appropriate next-steps they can take.
What would you like to see happen in this case?
Well, I think there are two parts to answering this question. What I would absolutely love to see would be for Professor Abouhaidar to take a HIV Core-skills type training program offered at a local AIDS Service Organization, and potentially also sensitivity and anti-discrimination training. That doesn’t seem very likely though, so as a bare minimum I believe that I fair resolution to this problem would include an apology. The apology should not only be to me, but also to the class as a whole for providing them with misinformation, and particularly for gay men (msm), and any other students that may be living with HIV. Along with that apology Professor AbouHaidar should provide true information about the epidemiology and transmission of HIV/AIDS, correcting what he has misinformed.
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Footnote: Subsequent to our interview it was reported that Professor AbouHaidar plans to apologize to his class for the misinformation that is the subject of this interview. Said the professor in Xtra “ “Well, if I said 90 percent, I’m wrong,” Regarding the use of male pronouns, AbouHaidar says students shouldn’t read so much into it. “I’m not anti-gay or pro-gay. It’s not my business who sleeps with who. It’s my job to tell students how the virus is transmitted.” AbouHaidar says he wasn’t aware that referring to HIV as a “gift” — which implies that the person being infected with HIV is asking for it — could be seen as problematic.
“It wasn’t meant to be against any group,” he says. “Now, because there are many viral drugs that are used, there are resistant strains circulating around. Sometimes in lectures I am known to be funny, and make jokes, in order to make stuff stick [with students] . . . these are education methods.
“It’s obviously not a good gift,” he says. “I can see how it’s [derogatory]. But we are all adults.”
I feel really bad. We want to clear this virus from the world. We work in vaccines so hopefully in the long run we might end HIV. When you see the millions of people dying, you are scared. [But] I don’t want to stigmatize anyone . . . perhaps the way I express something is not right for some people.
“I am not afraid to say I am wrong, and I am sorry. If I said 90 percent, that’s wrong. I will correct [the information] for the class.”
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You can follow Rodney Rousseau on twitter @RodneyKyle.