Why it's important to make sure our prisons are disease-free

A doctor conducting regular medical checks for inmates at the Sungai Buloh Prison. Photos: Filepics

A sentence in prison should not also mean a life sentence with a deadly disease. Yet prisons can be hotbeds of infectious diseases.

In nearly all countries, prisoners bear far higher burdens of HIV, tuberculosis (TB) and hepatitis, than the wider community. In Malaysia, levels of HIV infection among prisoners are 15 times higher than the general population, according to a 2010 study by University of Malaya’s Centre of Excellence in Research on AIDS (CERiA) and Yale University.