India's AIDS crisis and Kolkata public health program
Paroma Basu looks at India's mounting AIDS crisis and one innovative local public health program. "In recent years, public health officials, social workers, and politicians swarmed Kolkata's red-light areas, advocating safe sex, offering medical services, and distributing condoms. These campaigns resulted in tremendously successful initiatives like the Sonagachi AIDS Project, which went from being a quasi-governmental program to one of the largest community-run intervention projects in the world. Sex workers themselves now run the show, and in Sonagachi (meaning "golden tree"), famous as the oldest, largest, and most storied red-light district in the city, only 9 percent of about 6000 sex workers are HIV positive. In comparison, rates of infection among Mumbai (formerly Bombay) prostitutes as of 1997 were as high as 70 percent. At the end of 2001, the total number of people living with AIDS in India was 3,970,000, according to UNAIDS."
