Where Prostitutes Also Fight AIDS (Brazil)

Where Prostitutes Also Fight AIDS
Brazil's Sex Workers Hand Out Condoms, Crossing U.S. Ideological Line
By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 2, 2006; Page A14

RIO DE JANEIRO -- 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. (...)

"I'm always telling people that they should never do anything without a condom," Duran said. "A lot of the young people who come around here don't know anything about it, so I try to teach them whatever I can."

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.