The Advisory Group offers a greater understanding of the situation of sex workers – an understanding that is necessary to address the abuses they face and to ensure they have universal access to HIV services. Every effort has been made to highlight good practices that enhance human rights protections for sex workers, as well as practices that create barriers to universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support.
Nevada is the only US state in which commercial sex is legal. Since 1971, counties of fewer than 400000 people
have been able to elect to legalize brothels. At present, there are 32 legal brothels employing about 300 licensed prostitutes. Licensed brothel sex workers undergo weekly state-mandated medical examinations for gonorrhea, herpes, and venereal warts and monthly blood tests for syphilis. In March 1986, the Nevada Board of Health began requiring a negative initial human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) antibody test and negative monthly tests thereafter as a condition of employment. If a brothel worker or applicant is found to be seropositive, her employment is immediately terminated or denied.
This article aims to address female sex workers at high risk for contracting HIV in China by recommending evidence-based socio-structural interventions and policies at the national level that have yielded effective outcomes in other countries. National governments such as the Philippines and Hong Kong have utilized the Social Hygiene Clinic (SHC) model. A similar national policy can be highly effective in China.
Article by Julia Medew in The Age, May 31, 2011.
Health Minister David Davis has backed down from a plan for Victorian sex workers to have fewer tests for sexually transmitted infections, prompting sharp criticism from public health experts who say the plan should go ahead.
Last week, a Department of Health project officer told a health and sex work conference the government had approved a move from monthly to three-monthly tests for sex workers in the regulated industry from September.
The Southern Africa Litigation Centre and the Centre for the Development of People will be filing a challenge to the mandatory HIV testing of sex workers in Mwanza, Malawi. The applicants, 11 sex workers, were arrested by police while at a local restaurant, taken to a local public hospital, and subjected to an HIV test without their consent. The test results were announced publicly in court by the Magistrate and they were found guilty of spreading venereal disease. The Magistrate ordered those not from Mwanza to leave the locality.
Hungary’s Constitutional Court has annulled a legal provision requiring sex workers to provide a doctor’s certificate on the ground that it conflicts with article 17 of the 1950 New York Convention. The ruling is to come into force on December 31 this year.
