Dimitrina Dimitrova
is the Deputy Director of the ILO’s Official Meetings Department
The 106th Session of the International Labour Conference gets under way in Geneva, Switzerland from June 5-16. Here’s a look at the main issues that will be discussed by government, employer and worker delegates from the ILO’s 187 member states.
Wu Rulian, HIV-OSH, ILO Country Office for China and Mongolia
In 2014, during a routine surgery on a patient with liver cancer at a provincial Chinese hospital, Dr. Xu Jun, 35, accidently cut himself with a scalpel.
He got worried. What if he got infected by HIV or hepatitis? He waited for months for a diagnosis, fearing the potential impact of illness on his job and ability to care for his three-year old son. One of his colleagues had previously lost her job after getting infected with HIV.
Margherita Licata and Kofi Amekudzi, Technical Specialists ILOAIDS
The more we learn about the challenges of responding to the Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa, the easier it becomes to discern parallels to the HIV epidemic — another health crisis , which we’ve been battling for over 30 years now. The HIV response has some valuable lessons for the way we confront the disease in general, particularly in the workplace. Here’s an example.
About four years ago, we were working in southern Malawi with the ILO Programme for HIV/AIDS on a project targeting workers at the Lujeri Tea Estate. Though the rate of new infections has slowed, Malawi still has some of the highest HIV infection rates in the world, affecting one in every four people who lives there.
Work In Progress 