New Zealand’s Sunday Star Times carries the most disturbing personal tragedy I’ve read about in a very long time:
An HIV-positive man injected his wife with his own blood while she slept, infecting her with the virus that causes Aids.
It is believed the man wanted to give her the disease so she would start having sex with him again. She told police he also hoped it would prevent her from finding another man and leaving him.
The man, 35, admitted infecting his wife, in the first case of its kind in New Zealand. In other cases, HIV-positive people have infected others through unprotected sex.
The man has been remanded in prison awaiting sentence for wilfully infecting another with a disease, an offence that carries a maximum 14 years’ imprisonment. The pair cannot be identified.
In court documents, the woman, 33, described how her husband twice pricked her with a sewing needle laced with his infected blood as she slept and how she once caught him handling a syringe full of his blood.
In the year before the man pricked his now-estranged wife, the couple had been experiencing relationship problems, in part because of the woman’s refusal to have sex with him, as she feared she would contract the disease.
She had tested negative for the human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) on at least four occasions before the year-long abstinence, so police were certain the needle stick had caused her to be infected.
[continues in the Sunday Star Times]
