Sharleen Spiteri (died 2005) was an Australian HIV+ sex worker, who became the focus of significant media, public and New South Wales Government attention in Australia after appearing on the 60 Minutes television programme in 1989, where she revealed in an interview that she sometimes had sex with clients without revealing her illness or using condoms.
[1][2] After the 60 Minutes programme went to air, Spiteri was forcibly detained by New South Wales Police and Health Department authorities, using an obscure section of the Public Health Act (Section 32a), originally intended for the control of tuberculosis.
Into the early 1990s Spiteri's case continued to spark national public debate.
In 2015, Tom Morton and Eurydice Aroney, both journalists and lecturers at the University of Technology Sydney,[3][4] published Journalism, Moral Panic and the Public Interest - The Case of Sharleen Spiteri.
[5] The paper questioned the ethics of the reporting of Spiteri's case.