Via the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting: After the Earthquake: Looming AIDS Crisis in Haiti. Excerpt:
Haiti used to be a model for combating AIDS. Experts at first thought the epidemic might wipe out a third of the population. But instead the country became a surprising success story: Thanks to significant financial support from the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief as well as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria prevalence rates fell from 9.4 percent in 1993 to 2.2 percent in 2008.
January’s earthquake, however, destroyed many health facilities, and experts are afraid that with the high rates of rape, prostitution, and promiscuity in the camps, there will be an explosive increase in the number of new HIV infections.
“I think we could well have 200,000 to 300,000 affected by HIV,” says Esther Boucicault, founder of Foundation Esther Boucicault Stanislas, a grassroots HIV/AIDS organization. “Because what can you do in a tent? Nothing. Nothing, no entertainment, nothing. The only thing you can do is sex. So you have sex.”
Doctors doing HIV testing at a clinic at one of Haiti’s many tent camps are seeing at least 15 to 20 new cases each day in that one camp alone, says Beatrice Dalencourt Turnier, a social mobilization officer at The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.
Shortly after the earthquake, Turnier and her team tried to distribute condoms in the camps, but those in charge of the emergency response did not see this as a priority.
“Once somebody has access to food, to water, to shelter, the next need is affection and sex,” says Turnier. “But it's very difficult for people that work in an emergency to understand that. When people are giving out food and you're telling them they need to give condoms, it's like ‘Why do you want to bother me with that?’”
