TATTOO PLAN SHOULD STICK

Roy Romanow recently spoke to a seminar at the University of Toronto,
where he reiterated some of the highlights of his acclaimed royal
commission on the future of health care, including the commission's
lofty goal of making Canadians "the healthiest people in the world."

The biggest challenge, Romanow said, is changing government attitudes.

"Governments have to view the decisions they make through the prism
of 'will it invest in the well-being of our society -- in our health
and overall quality of life -- or will it diminish those things?'"

The federal ministry of public safety's decision to cancel an
experimental prison tattoo program aimed at reducing the spread of
AIDS and hepatitis will do nothing to improve the well-being of society.

Although Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day claimed the $960,000
program wasn't "demonstrably effective," a study by the Correctional
Service of Canada viewed the program through a different angle of the
Romanow prism, and found it did.

The Correctional Service's findings should not be underestimated.
Prison administrators aren't known for their willingness to embrace change.

Yet a draft evaluation by the CSC found the program had 'the
potential to reduce harm, reduce exposure to health risk, and enhance
the health and safety of staff members, inmates and the general public.'

None of these findings is new or particularly surprising to Dr. Peter
Ford, a Kingston doctor who proposed the tattoo program and tested it
in Joyceville Institution 14 years ago. Ford thinks a lot like Roy
Romanow -- and, as a former consultant to the Correctional Service,
has hands-on experience with the prison culture as well.

Ford is also the author of a number of groundbreaking research
studies that discovered an epidemic of hepatitis C in federal
penitentiaries in the mid-1990s.

The virus, which inflames the liver and can lead to cancer, spreads
like wildfire in prisons because inmates use dirty needles to ink
tattoos and inject illegal drugs. Legalizing the tattoo program was
intended to reduce hepatitis infections -- and to a lesser degree,
HIV infections -- by providing prisoners with sterile equipment. By
all accounts, it appeared to be working.

The guards' union, meantime, is on record as opposing the
government-funded tattoo program, arguing that it undermines
workplace safety. Giving inmates clean needles, the guards say, is
like handing them a lethal weapon. The prevalence of HIV and
hepatitis, however, suggests prisoners can get their hands on
potentially harmful weapons whether or not they're supplied by
Canadian taxpayers.

Ford has been calling for a national debate on the hepatitis epidemic
for years, warning that the burden on the health-care system will be
astronomical. Most inmates will eventually leave prison and make a
new home in a community.

"Hepatitis C involves a long, expensive death with long hospital
admissions," Ford says. "It really is a horror story."