HIV-positive people will be able to join the army

This is the end of what many observers considered to be discrimination in hiring, given the progress of medicine. HIV-positive people will now be able to join the army, announced this Monday on France 2 the Minister of the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu.

A decree, which will “review all the criteria of aptitude to enter the armed forces”, “will be published in the days to come”. “Having HIV will no longer be a criterion of discrimination in principle”, he underlined, to enter the “gendarmerie, the firefighters of Paris and Marseille, and all of the armed forces”.

New the****utic protocols

Until now, the medical criteria for aptitude for integration did not allow HIV-positive people to access these professions. “It was not necessarily only discriminatory: the health services of the armies sometimes had some fears, in particular for our servants who served in external operations”, underlined the minister.

These services “did a remarkable job with the ***ociations”, explained Sébastien Lecornu to justify the evolution of the rules. ” They have develops the****utic protocols so that having HIV is no longer a discriminatory criterion,” he added. The latest scientific studies have shown that HIV-positive people receiving antiretroviral treatment have an undetectable viral load and do not transmit HIV.

An evolution already recorded in the police

At the end of November 2022, this discrimination in hiring targeting people living with HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS, had already been lifted for the police. The government had repealed by decree the application of Sigycop, a device for evaluating physical fitness used in several public service professions.

Applied strictly, this ***essment cl***ified HIV-positive people as unfit. Until now, the Ministry of the Armed Forces, whose health service governs the recruitment of gendarmes and military firefighters, had always refused to modify the Sigycop.

With AFP