Two Hard-Hit Countries Offer Rare Success Stories

摘要

Chiang rai and bangkok, thailand, and phnom penh, cambodia―On a moonless evening, a group of female and trans-gendered sex workers wearing identification cards around their necks strolls through a park that abuts a Buddhist temple in downtown Phnom Penh. The dark park has a wide variety of sex for hire. Men seeking men head for the fountain. Straight women sit on the grass with small piles of oranges in front of them, a thinly veiled cover for negotiating a later sexual rendezvous. Men dressed as women, some of whom have breasts from taking steroids, hang out near the restrooms. The people with the identification cards have worked this park themselves many a night, but this evening they have a different mission: Oxfam Hong Kong has hired them to distribute condoms. Like neighboring Thailand, Cambodia has mounted a "100% condom program" that, with help from sex workers them- selves, aims to persuade everyone selling or paying for sex to use a condom with each encounter. Supported by government and nongovernmental organizations, the campaigns have yielded measurable successes. In Cambodia, HIV prevalence among all adults fell from 4% in 1999 to 2.6% by the end of 2002, by which point the Ministry of Health estimated that a total of 259,000 Cambodians had become infected since the first case surfaced in 1991. A recent study by the Cambodian Ministry of Health projected that without increased condom use and other behavior changes, Cambodia would have had about three times as many HIV infections.