"Twenty-two years ago, in a decision rooted in fear rather than fact, the United States instituted a travel ban on entry into the country for people living with HIV/AIDS," Obama said as he signed a bill reauthorizing funding for a federal program providing HIV-related health care.

"Now, we talk about reducing the stigma of this disease -- yet we've treated a visitor living with it as a threat," he said at the signing ceremony of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act.

"If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it. And that's why on Monday, my administration will publish a final rule that eliminates the travel ban effective just after the New Year," Obama said.

Obama's predecessor George W. Bush signed legislation last year that removed HIV from a list of diseases "of public health significance" that effectively barred any person infected with HIV from entering the United States.

But the law was not implemented by the US Department of Health and Human Services, which regulates US immigration authorities in some instances.

Human rights and HIV/AIDS activism groups hailed the end of the controversial ban, saying it would put the US back in a leadership role in the fight against the illness and would help to lift the stigma associated with AIDS.

"We applaud President Obama for working to reduce the stigma of HIV/AIDS by announcing this important policy change and reminding us of the voice a young man named Ryan White who was living with HIV and wanted to go to school," Rebecca Haag, director of the AIDS Action Council, said.

The Ryan White bill, which was first passed 19 years ago, is named after a 13-year-old boy who contracted HIV during a blood transfusion in 1984 -- a time when the virus was first becoming known and was hugely misunderstood.

His family was forced to move from the town in Indiana where they lived after some parents protested when he continued to show up for class, with some pulling their own children out of the school.

Physicians for Human Rights hailed the lifting of the ban, which it said had "made the United States a pariah in human rights circles, and harmed our reputation as a world leader of HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and care."

The HIV Medicine Association (HIVMA) bade the ban "good riddance," saying the "discriminatory rule... had no basis in public health or sound science.

"This long-overdue move brings the US in line with current scientific and international standards of public health and will lessen the painful stigma and discrimination suffered by HIV-positive people," HIVMA chairwoman Arlene Bardeguez said in a statement.

The ban on HIV-positive foreigners entering the United States had been in place since 1987 -- three years before Ryan White died and the law that now bears his name was first passed.

Obama made the announcement in the US capital, where three percent of all residents over the age of 12 have HIV or full-blown AIDS.

The United Nations' HIV/AIDS agency and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have said HIV is "generalized and severe" when one percent of a given population is infected.

Some 1.1 million people in the United States are believed to have HIV, according to the CDC.

earlier related report
Swaziland battles twin plagues of HIV, TB
Zodwa Mahlabane meticulously takes out her tablets from small yellow bags and puts them on a white tray.

She counts 15 pills in different colours, sizes and shapes and uses a large plastic jug full of water to drink her multi-drug resistant tuberculosis medication.

This is how the 29-year-old starts her day and it is how she finishes it. And that's not even counting the pills she takes for her HIV infection.

"This has been my life for the past two years," she said.

Her story is similar to hundreds of patients who go to Nhlangano health centre in Swaziland's southern Shiselweni region to treat the killer twin epidemic of AIDS and TB.

According to the international medical aid organisation Doctors Without Borders (MSF), 80 percent of TB patients in Swaziland also have HIV, placing severe pressure on the small kingdom's public health system.

Those challenges are the subject of a three-day workshop ending Friday, sponsored by MSF and the Swazi government to find ways of tackling a problem that the medical group says threatens to destabilise the nation.

"Each year there are roughly 14,000 new TB cases diagnosed among this very small population of just over 1.1 million people," said MSF head of mission Aymeric Peguillan.

"This double epidemic of HIV and TB means that life expectancy has fallen to under 32 years in Swaziland."

Mahlabane, the mother of a six-year-old boy and openly living with HIV, said she was first diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1996, but she only finished her second phase of treatment last week -- a process that involves being injected every day for nine months.

"At first I took the tablets but they made me sick so I stopped. When the TB came back again I refused to take medication, but my son begged me to and I went back on treatment.

"I continued taking my pills but I was not getting better. I knew about my status but I was not doing anything about it until 2003."

That's when her doctor placed her anti-retrovirals because important cells in her body's immune system had disappeared to dangerously low levels.

With 80 percent of Swaziland's population living in impoverished rural areas, getting healthcare services to families is extremely difficult.

Mahlabane stays with her sister in a rented one-room mud-brick house furnished with a bed, fridge, radio and few food items on the floor.

"I had to move from another village to Nhlangano because I became very sick and couldn't afford to take a taxi everyday. I was not working so all my money I had to save for food," she told AFP.

Joyce Sibanda, an MSF nurse at Nhlangano health centre, said more than 100 patients come every day for help from only four nurses on staff.

The country has very few doctors and no medical school.

"The workload is a lot, there are many registers and forms to fill in," Sibanda said.

"We have also started the integration process where if someone has TB and also HIV positive they can take medication in one place, unlike before where people had to go to different places to get medication."

She said most patients complained about their weak finances, mistreatment at home because of their illness, and side effects of the medications.

Another patient, Nomcebo Mhlanga, a 31-year-old high school teacher who has been on multi resistance TB drugs for over a year, said she almost gave up on the treatment because instead of getting better she got worse.

"I experienced severe itching every hour after taking tablets, and this could go on for seven hours.

"All my limbs and joints became stiff and painful. My eyesight started failing. I almost became blind and worst of all the medication deafened me -- I am still deaf," Mhlanga said.

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