Kenya's Moi says hang deliberate spreaders of AIDS

NAIROBI, Kenya (Reuters) -- Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi has demanded the death penalty for people who knowingly infect others with HIV/AIDS, to deter men from passing the disease to vulnerable younger women, newspapers reported on Sunday.

MESSAGE BOARD AIDS prevention

"We have to make laws that restrict those who deliberately infect others because young girls cannot protect themselves from such criminals," Moi told reporters on his return from last week's major United Nations AIDS conference in New York.

"The time has come for those who deliberately infect others to die and those who rape to get life," the Sunday Nation quoted Moi as saying.

Researchers say infection rates among young African women are far higher than for males, partly due to their vulnerability to older men who use their dominant social and economic status to pressure them into unprotected sex.

Moi blamed the church for not doing enough to educate Christians about the dangers of the virus, which has infected about 2.2 million of Kenya's estimated 30 million people, saying the best defense against AIDS was "good morals."

"If 80 percent of Kenyans are Christian, why is AIDS spreading this fast?" he said.

Kenya's government passed a law in June to allow the import and manufacture of cheap medicines to combat HIV/AIDS, but researchers say the East African country still lags behind some of its neighbors in facing up to the devastating illness.

Moi said the government would review Kenya's laws to deal with people guilty of knowingly passing on the virus and introduce tougher penalties for rapists.

The United Nations says Kenya, South Africa, Ethiopia, India and Nigeria are the countries hardest-hit by the epidemic, each with at least 2 million infected adults.

Copyright 2001 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.