03/04/06-03/06/06
Posted on Fri, Mar. 03, 2006
Brazil follows own path on AIDS
COUNTRY AT ODDS WITH U.S. OVER PROSTITUTES' HELP
By Monte Reel
Washington Post
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Paula Duran is an outreach worker with a style of her own. That style -- heavy on fishnet, tattoos and suggestive poses -- is at the heart of an ideological disagreement between Brazil and the United States over the best way to fight AIDS. Duran, 35, is a prostitute in Villa Mimosa, a red-light district in this seaside city where an estimated 3,500 sex workers lounge in the doorways and lean out the windows of scarred, decaying buildings.
(snip)
But the U.S. government strongly disapproves of such unorthodox methods. Two weeks ago, Brazil received a letter from USAID declaring the country ineligible for a renewal of a $48 million AIDS prevention grant. The United States requires all countries receiving AIDS funding help to formally state that prostitution is dehumanizing and degrading, and Brazil last year -- alone among AIDS aid recipients -- was unwilling to do that.
A working partnership with prostitutes, health officials here say, is a key reason that the country's AIDS prevention and treatment programs are considered by the United Nations to be the most successful in the developing world. There are at least 600,000 people infected with HIV in Brazil -- but that is only half the number predicted by the World Bank a decade ago.
``When we started in the 1980s, our projected AIDS rates were exactly the same as Africa's, but now it's a completely different story,'' said Mariangela Simao, deputy director of Brazil's national HIV-AIDS program in Brasília. ``I'm convinced it's a result of the way the government has responded. We provide information and resources, and don't enter into moral or religious issues.''
(snip/...)
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/14007591.htm
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
