Drugs, sex work, and HIV in three South African cities

Abstract

Abstract Prostitutes in urban areas in South Africa were studied to examine the extent to which drug addiction has led to prostitution. Samples drawn from sex workers in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town were studied. The hypothesised link between drug addiction and prostitution was not found. Running an analysis of variance (ANOVA), with HIV as the dependent variable and ethnicity (excepting the small Indian sample) and drug use as dependent variables indicated that ethnicity is highly associated with HIV, that drug use is not associated with HIV, and the interaction between ethnicity and drug use is not quite significant (p = 0.057). Testing whether a positive association exists between use of hard drugs and HIV sero-prevalence among commercial sex workers in South Africa, revealed that hard drug users were actually less likely to be HIV positive (27%) than non-users (56%). Other characteristics of prostitution in South Africa relevant to HIV/AIDS are discussed.