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Nepal
Girls an Aids Factor In India: Study
New York:
Young girls who have been trafficked abroad into
prostitution are emerging as an AIDS risk factor
in their home countries, according to an American
Medical Association study released on August 1.
The study says that the
girls who were forced into prostitution before
age 15 and girls traded between brothels were
particularly likely to be infected. Shunned by
their families and villages on their return, they
sometimes end up selling themselves again, increasing
the risk.
The study, in the Journal
of the American Medical Association (AMA) concerns
girls from Nepal trafficked into bordellos in
India but the problem is also emerging elsewhere,
said the lead author, Jay G. Silverman, a professor
of human development at Harvard's School of Public
Health.
Girls from China's sold
to Southeast Asian brothels, Iraqi girls from
refugee camps in Syria and Jordan, and Afghan
girls driven into Iran or Pakistan all appear
to be victims of the same pattern, he said, and
are presumably contributing to the HIV outbreaks
in southern China, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
"Most authorities
fighting human trafficking don't see it as having
anything to do with HIV," Dr Silverman said.
"It is just not being documented." A
former Nepal coordinator for UNAIDS, called the
study "very important", said the New
York Times. "It's the first I know of that's
linked HIV to sex-trafficked girls," she
said.
India's epidemic, the study
said concentrated among prostitutes, truckers,
men who have sex with men and people who inject
drugs, is most common in its industrialized south
and in the heroin-smuggling areas near Pakistan
and Myanmar, not in regions bordering Nepal.
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