AIDS epidemic spreads throughout West Africa
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This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from November 1994.
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In the West African country's capital, Abidjan, as many as 80 percent of the port city's 12,000 prostitutes may carry the AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) virus, according to AIDS laboratory Retro-CI (Retrovirus Cote d'Ivoire).
Ivory Coast also has the highest reported rate in the region of infection with the AIDS virus, HIV, and is cited as being among the 10 most affected countries on the African continent, researchers say.
Not only that, migrant workers are spreading the epidemic from Ivory Coast to other West African countries.
A regional transit centre with a high number of immigrant workers, Ivory Coast offers fertile ground for the spread of the virus to neighbouring countries, a report by the National Institute of Public Health says.
The study, presented at a recent AIDS seminar, says migrant workers leave their wives in their home countries and tend to visit prostitutes during their stay abroad.
"As the majority of the prostitutes are HIV-positive a high rate of contamination can be noted. Furthermore, when the workers return home and resume conjugal life they carry with them unknowingly the AIDS virus and other sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs)," the report says. About 38 percent of Abidjan's two million residents are aliens, mainly from Burkina Faso, Ghana, Niger, Mali and Guinea. Many of the prostitutes are also migrants, who return to their homelands when they begin to suffer the effects of AIDS.
"When a prostitute starts developing symptoms, she starts losing weight, she goes back home. She then continues her activities over there, until the state of her health no longer permits it. By that time, she has had time to spread the virus," said Antoinette Tiemele, coordinator for the Aids Prevention Project among Prostitutes (PPP).
"Who are their clients? Everybody. Everybody goes to prostitutes, young men in particular, when they first become sexually active," she added.
"I think a pandemic has already occurred, in that the problem of HIV infection has increased considerably over the last 10 years in the region," said Peter Ghys, head of the STD department at RetroCI.
