14 DAY TRIAL // 1. AIDS is a huge menace for the public health, but in Africa it also has a deep impact on the economical side. With about 28 million cases of HIV positive and 2 million annual deaths, HIV epidemic in the sub-Saharan Africa is going to cancel the progresses registered in social and economical development. African companies face the increasing employees' absenteeism and death caused by AIDS.
A national railway company lost to AIDS 10% of the personnel while in another one, 3,400 out of the overall 11,500 employees were HIV infected. Farming is on decline, as many farmers die of AIDS. Moreover, there is an increasing lack of education in many African countries, and illiteracy is growing as many families do not have the money, nor time to send their kids to school, while hundreds of teachers die of AIDS.
2. It is estimated that currently between 33.4 and 46 million people live with HIV (the average value means as much as the population of Spain). By now about 25 million people died of AIDS, and research carried in African countries showed that there are 20% more women than men infected with HIV.
In the case of the teenagers, the risk of getting infected with HIV is 5 times higher in girls than in boys. In the last decade, the increase of the injectable drug consume in the former Soviet Union was correlated with a 50% increase of the HIV cases. Worldwide, over half of the HIV positive patients get the disease around the age of 25, and generally die before the age of 35.
3.In India, truck drivers are considered an extremely vulnerable category for getting infected with HIV. Spending long periods of time away from their families, thousands of drivers visit the brothels of Bombay. It is estimated that 50-60% of the about 80,000 Bombay prostitutes are HIV positive.
From Bombay, the drivers cross the country. In the villages located close to the driveway, there are lines of shacks in which the village girls make a buck by having sex with the truck drivers. These places are also visited by rich young men from the nearby cities, and this leads to an entanglement of the virus' transmission.
Moreover, truck drivers believe in a superstition saying that sexual intercourses are essential for keeping a low body temperature, necessary when they drive for hours at high temperatures.