By Marina Esplin-Jones Bermuda's response to people struggling with AIDS is "a national disgrace'', Health Watch co-founder Mr. Eugene Carmichael claims.

Bermudians with the virus were being forced out of their jobs and homes, even chased from the Island by the cruel attitudes towards them, the head of the medical watchdog group told a Caribbean nurses conference.

The prevailing attitude was driving people with the virus into depression and causing them to die "lonesome, isolated and most undignified deaths'', he said.

In certain churches, clergymen were condemning people with AIDS, he told The Royal Gazette yesterday.

And when in hospital, staff, housekeeping workers in particular, were refusing to serve people in the throes of the disease, leaving their food trays outside their rooms, he claimed.

"Still, in this day and age, people are reticent of getting close to people coping with AIDS,'' he said.

"We've had to cope with the illness for a long enough period now that we should be responding a lot more charitably to AIDS sufferers,'' he said.

Mr. Carmichael said yesterday he decided to speak out on the issue as a result of a recent meeting with some AIDS sufferers. He became so distressed by their plight that he had to cut short the meeting, which he held as part of his research for Government's ongoing health care review.

They told him it was "literally unbearable'' when your family and the community in general shunned you on top of having a deadly disease, he said.

He was told of cases where landlords had evicted tenants on finding out they had the AIDS virus while employers had dismissed them.

"We are practically at the point where people who find themselves diagnosed HIV-positive are immediately going into the closet for fear of reprisal,'' he said.

Some were "retreating abroad'' for medical care rather than face the stigma and isolation here. Others found themselves homeless and headed to the Light House, a residence run by the AIDS support group STAR.

"They are being shunned by their families, whole families sometimes,'' he said. "Friends suddenly evaporate. Certain clergy are even preaching that the AIDS virus is God's punishment.'' He said Bermudians were still reasoning, "They (people with the virus) must have contracted the illness as a result of their lifestyle choices (not necessarily), and our lifestyle choices, we reason, will never expose us. Oh really! "Lifestyle choices are a major part of it, but the facts of the matter are that if you feel you are personally not at risk, someone whom you love and cherish is, or will be. And how many victims were scrupulous in their own lifestyle only to have the virus brought home to them by someone they trusted?'' Mr. Carmichael said a separate set of public AIDS awareness messages was needed to promote compassion towards HIV-positive people.

"I am aware of those pockets of enlightenment in Bermuda where important and compassionate work is undertaken for those who are afflicted,'' he said.

"I do not mean to belittle their efforts in any way. However, we as a community, place far too many obstacles in the way of the AIDS afflicted just through our negative attitudes.

"In my view another programme is required as an addition to those excellent public service announcements which seek to advise people how not to become a victim. That is, a series of announcements which promote tolerance, understanding, love and compassion towards those caught up inextricably in the grip of AIDS. Such are the hallmarks of a truly civilised and enlightened society which we claim to be.''