At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when AIDS was still a little-understood disease, governments often took actions that were not beneficial to the health crisis in general, nor the people affected by it. One of these initiatives - travel restrictions were put into place to slow or altogether stop people living with HIV from traveling into countries with the restrictions. Over 20 year after the restrictions were originally implemented, many countries have eliminated these inappropriate restrictions after a broad consensus from the public health community agreed about their ineffectiveness and discriminatory nature. In spite of this, 74 countries still have some form of HIV specific travel restrictions, and 12 countries ban HIV positive people from entering the country for any reason or length of time.