DOC/OSPOLXIM/324c/II There were no means of transport for sick people (ambulance) in any of the prison health centres. At best sick people were transferred to hospitals in a prison vehicle or by public transport. In most prisons visited inland, sick persons would have to walk to hospital if they could to receive treatment. At Masaka prison, for example, sick persons who needed to be transferred had no other choice than to walk 1 km to the district hospital. The infirmary's bicycle used to transport patients who could not walk had broken down several months earlier. The lack of means of transport explains in part the delay in transferring sick people to hospitals, which was one of the main complaints of the prisoners when they spoke to the Special Rapporteur's delegation. With the exception of the model prison hospital, nearly all prison infirmaries are installed in improvised premises. The space allocated to these infirmaries in prison is usually so small that they do not have an adequate consulting room or quarantine rooms for patients with contagious diseases and sometimes not even toilets. This lack of a consulting room where patients can be seen, with respect for their intimacy and private life is a bigger problem in the large prisons where a relatively greater number of prisoners daily request the services of the infirmary. In Mbale and Masaka prisons, which held respectively 811 and 668 prisoners on the day of the visit of the Special Rapporteur's delegation, the medical staff had a lot of difficulty consulting and giving treatment in a single room. This undoubtedly affected the quality of the medical consultations, which the doctors had to make as short as possible. For this reason, the management of Mbale prison and their families, who should have been able to use the infirmary, never went there. In this infirmary, the office that is used as a treatment room is so small that a bed will not fit into it. It is thus in the only room for hospitalization that consultations are held, on a bed that is not separated from the other patients' beds even by a simple screen. According to the prison rules, the superintendents of prisons in which there are detainees who require a special diet for reasons of health must apply to the Director of the Prison Health Department. The latter should deal with the issue through the administrative and financial services of the Department and contact the prison superintendent once he has obtained the requested means. In practice, this process has never worked well, as it is too slow and sometimes ends without a favourable result. Thus, some superintendents simply decide to make the sick persons' families contribute whenever possible, while trying in their turn to increase the quantity of rations served to these sick prisoners. The health policy in the field of HIV screening has been reviewed in Uganda. Until recently, the AIDS test was not only free of charge for everybody, but the medical corps also had the power of requesting it systematically for any persons who presented signs of the disease. Today however, the medical corps is requested to work on the basis of the clinical signs of the disease, and the test is used only as a last resort. Its cost of about US$1 is very modest, but is still out of reach of most detainees. This fact explains why some people with AIDS are never tested, and yet this would help the medical corps to know the serological status of their patients in order to provide better treatment for them. The efforts of NGOs like TASO to encourage voluntary testing for AIDS among prisoners through its various branches, are of course praiseworthy but remain insufficient within the prisons. During the conversations between the delegation and the prisoners, many of the latter asked to be screened for AIDS, voluntarily and free of charge. At Murchison Bay prison, prisoners expressed their wish to the delegation for a law to be adopted allowing those of their colleagues who were in the terminal stages of AIDS to be released, to be able to die at home. A study on the causes of death in Ugandan prisons, covering a period of 10 years (1985 — 1995) identified tuberculosis as being the main cause of death in prisons. In an interview published in « Prisons in the New Vision 2001-2002 » the Director of the Prison Health Department indicated that the risk of contracting tuberculosis in prison is around 15 times greater than outside prison. The same source reports that 34% of deaths in prison are due to pulmonary infections, including tuberculosis. Current overcrowding in nearly all the prisons, some of which hold three times their capacity, the absence of quarantine rooms for persons 21