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AIDS experts say focus on sex industry
By Paul Alexander
December 1, 2004
Islamabad - Ignoring the sex industry will allow AIDS to spread unchecked, aid
workers said Tuesday at a conference aimed at fighting the pandemic in
Asia-Pacific, where even discussing sex is taboo in many countries.
"Sex work cannot be abolished. We must recognize these sex workers are human
beings, too," Khartini Slamah of the Malaysian aid group APNSW told the
three-day Asia-Pacific conference on how women and girls can be saved from the
pandemic.
"It's not just about providing condoms; it's also providing information in how
to use them," she said.
About 400 aid workers from around the world are attending the conference that
opened Monday. The growing theme has been empowerment - and ensuring that
women's human rights aren't trampled.
"The empowerment of women is the best vaccine we now have against AIDS," said
UNIFEM Director Noeleen Heyder.
But that isn't easy in a region with conservative, male-dominated societies,
where hundreds of thousands of women are forced or deceived into the
international sex-slave trade.
Slamah said that too often, government programs to find alternative professions
don't create attractive options.
"We don't need any more sewing machines," she said. "What we need are equal
jobs like other people."
Experts say females are 2.5 times more susceptible to contracting AIDS than
males. During the last two years, the steepest increases in the number of women
living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, have been in East Asia, up 56
percent, and Central Asia and Eastern Europe, both up 48 percent, according to
a new U.N. report.
The growing problem of intravenous drug abuse is a major contributing factor,
with an estimated 65 percent of addicts sharing needles. Tariq Zafar of the
Pakistani group Naizindagi said there has been a "tremendous shift" from
smoking heroin to injecting it.
The need for money to finance a spouse's addiction often forces women into the
sex trade, other officials said.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz vowed his country "will fight with full
strength against HIV/AIDS."
"It is painful reality that women in this region are generally more illiterate,
having less mobility, a lower socio-economic status and less access to health
care and education that men," Aziz said.
"This imbalance needs to be viewed as a key impediment not only to the
prevention of AIDS, but also to development and good governance."
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