The Aids Highway

Transport workers transport Aids. Many, like truck drivers and seafarers are away from home and family for weeks or months at a time. Alongside the proverbial seaman with 'a wife in every port', seafarers and truck and train drivers are more likely to frequent brothels or have casual sex.

HIV spreads fastest along main transport links. The International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) Congress was told that Uganda Railways has lost 5600 staff to Aids, a labour turnover rate of 15 per cent. A survey of one route in South India found 16 per cent of drivers were HIV positive compared to the national average of less than one per cent. Seafarers make up 40 per cent of the overseas Filipino workers infected with HIV. And the UN estimates that 22 per cent of Vietnamese seafarers in the Mekong region may be infected.

A recent Four Corners Report (Sick No Good, ABC TV, 14/8/06) traced an Aids epidemic in PNG infecting an estimated 100,000 people. It is spreading up the Highlands Highway, which stretches 700 kilometres from the north coast into the Highlands and connects about half the country's population. Along the road thousands of young women exchange sex for money, food, or a bed for the night. Some 17 per cent are HIV positive.

Dr Syed Asif Altaf, the ITF Aids Co-ordinator, told the ITF Congress it is the working class, less educated transport workers in developing countries who are most at risk. They are more vulnerable because they do not know how to protect themselves from infection or passing on the disease. They do not use condoms or practice safe sex. Nor are they are able to afford costly medication used to combat the onset of Aids. Women are the most at risk because they contract the illness more easily than men.

It is for this reason transport workers are the centre of an ITF campaign to combat the greatest plague on earth since the Black Death.

It is projected that by 2010 China will have 15 million infected and India 25 million. Today there are an estimated 38.6 million people infected worldwide.

Congress delegates voted unanimously to initiate a worldwide campaign against HIV/Aids that will be launched on World Aids Day, December 1 (for full details see www.itfglobal.org/press-area/index.cfm/pressdetail/948)

A full report on the HIV workshop by MUA delegate Bernie Gallen is included in the ITF Congress report which can be downloaded from the MUA website.