Public health authorities in Cheb, western Bohemia, have started contacting men whose names appeared on a list found with a prostitute who Libyan legend ...
Latest news - 27-05-2008 ... died of AIDS earlier this year.
Several of the woman’s former clients contacted so far have the HIV virus – and though it is not clear how many men paid her for sex, the fear is that number could be far higher.
When a 39-year-old prostitute known as Róza was admitted to a hospital in Cheb, western Bohemia, in March this year with a liver condition, nobody suspected that she was the person the local public health authorities had been looking for since 2005. Jaroslava Hrabáková is an epidemiologist at the Regional Hygiene Centre in Cheb.
“We found out in March this year, after Róza died, that she was the woman who between 2001 and 2004 infected two men here with HIV. The men then infected their partners. So we launched a search for other clients of hers to discover the whole network. We want to make these people start treatment, but mainly to stop the infection from spreading further into the population.”
The authorities received Róza’s phone book and started calling the numbers they thought might belong to the woman’s regular clients to warn them they could have been infected with HIV. Out of the 20 men reached so far, six are HIV positive. Do the authorities have any idea of how many men in total could have got the deadly virus from Róza?
“We don’t have any clear idea but I believe it could be a hundred or so. I have been told that she came to Cheb from Slovakia around 1995 but we don’t even know when she got infected – probably around 2000 or 2001, perhaps even earlier. So it’s really difficult to even estimate how many clients she had. Some say that she only had many contacts; others say she only had some German clients. So we don’t know how many people were involved but I think it could have been up to a hundred.”
Epidemiologists now hope that once Róza’s clients, both from the Czech Republic and Germany, learn of the case, they get tested for HIV and this particular line of the infection will not spread further. Experts say the case shows that campaigns to make potential clients of prostitutes aware of risk of HIV have had a much lower effect than expected; the authorities have also very little information on how many of an estimated 30,000 sex workers in the country could be HIV positive. Jaroslav Jehlička is the head of the National Programme for Combating AIDS in the Czech Republic.
“This is very difficult because we only rely on one national centre to deal with the problem of prostitution and HIV-AIDS; it’s the NGO project Bliss without Risk. From their data, it’s very difficult to estimate the prevalence of HIV among commercial sex workers. Some older data suggest that the prevalence might be on per mille – that is one per thousand women engaged in prostitution.”
(radio-Prague)
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