In January 25th of this year, a South African satirical news site, satirenews.co.za, published a ‘story’ headlined, ‘Law Passed: All HIV Positive People Would Be Marked Near Their Genitals’.
The ‘story’ reads as follows:
President Zuma signed a bill that seem to be the greatest step in history of trying to combat HIV. From now on every person who gets tested and found to be HIV positive would not just get counselling and medication. They would also get a mark in a form of a tattoo near their genital according to the bill singed by the president.
“The mark is to protect those who can’t say no to sex. I mean if you can’t read between the lines you should read between the legs because that’s where the status would be tatted. The choice to be HIV positive is now in your hands or your genitals for that matter….We also encourage those who had been living with the virus to go to the nearest public hospitals to get their status tatted in”. Said Jacob Zuma after signing the bill and drinking his ARV’s.
President Zuma volunteered to be the first South African citizen to get his status tatted near his genitals and he also announced that the first 10 million people(who already tested positive) to volunteer to have their HIV statuses tatted on their genitals would be given a R50 000 funeral expense voucher…. In a country where almost every sexual active person is more likely to be HIV positive hopefully this would help.
The story was initially ignored. But on April 23, it was repeated by a Tanzanian website as fact and within days it was disseminated throughout blogs and news sites thoughout Africa, and beyond, also as fact.
If you Google for ‘Zuma HIV tattoo law’, you’ll see that there are now more than 83,000 search results. The story also continues to be disseminated as fact on Twitter.
Not everyone believes it, thankfully, including this commenter on the original ‘satire’ site.
