Cuba Counters Prostitution With AIDS Programs -NYT

[Rose Siding]

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María, who is 36 and insisted that her last name not be published, said she worried about contracting AIDS and forced her clients to use condoms, every time. She is knowledgeable about the disease, having learned about it through the government's anti-AIDS program, and she was tested twice during a stint in jail last year for prostitution. Since then, she said, she voluntarily gets tested regularly at the free health clinics.

A decade after an economic collapse forced thousands of young women and men into prostitution, Cuba has become something of an anomaly in Latin America: a destination for sex tourists where AIDS has yet to become an uncontrollable pandemic.

Cuba has the lowest infection rate in the Western Hemisphere, less than 0.1 percent of the population, according to the World Health Organization. The infection rate in the United States is six times that in Cuba, and Cuba's rate is far below that in many neighboring countries in the Caribbean and Central America.
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For more than a decade, the government has run an intense public-education campaign in schools and on state-owned television and radio stations, promoting the use of condoms and informing people about how H.I.V., the human immunodeficiency virus, is transmitted. The system of free primary care clinics in Cuba, a Communist country, has also led to the early detection of the virus in many people, Cuban and United Nations officials say.
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A decades-old United States embargo on selling Cuba many medical supplies has crimped the country's ability to provide drugs to patients, but the government has replicated some advanced retroviral medicines used to fight AIDS, providing them at no cost. This, too, has slowed the epidemic

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/26/international/americas/26havana.html