The world needs more prostitutes like Hawa Abdallah. She is tested regularly. The same applies to injecting drug users, men who have sex with men, inmates and other groups in which HIV rates have moved against the global trend, and continue to rise. Halting the spread of HIV among these key populations comes down to a series of calculated risks for both governments and the individuals themselves. She never intended to spend her nights negotiating in the dark with a never-ending stream of drunks.
She wanted to be a hair stylist. Her boyfriend discovered what she was doing and tried to make her to stop. Officials consider both prostitution and homosexuality to be threats to the social order.
But of course, those same officials have also been preoccupied with a far more serious societal threat in recent years. When HIV began ravaging Africa, making its population the most-infected on the planet in the last decades of the 20th century, the virus struck Tanzania particularly hard. By the mids, close to 1 in 10 Tanzanians were dying; a generation of children were orphaned; local economies buckled. And for years, the Tanzanian government lacked the resources to respond in force.
At long last, Tanzanian officials β like many of their neighbors in sub-Saharan Africa β had both bragging rights and the numbers to back them up.
Treatment coverage jumped from 3. The number of health facilities providing HIV care and treatment services rose from a few dozen in to about 1, in Mother-to-child transmission of the virus plummeted. People started living longer. In fact, HIV prevalence is 22 times higher among people who inject drugs. In low- and middle-income countries, men who have sex with men and female sex workers are 19 and Consider year-old Abdul Rashid.
