Federal government websites often end in. The site is secure. Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October Learn More or Try it out now. The women, men, and transgender persons who sell sex globally have disproportionate risks and burdens of HIV, in low, middle and high income country settings, and in concentrated and generalized epidemic contexts. The greatest HIV burdens continue to be among African women sex workers.
Worldwide, sex workers continue to face reduced access to needed HIV prevention, treatment, and care services. These realities must change for the benefits of recent advances in HIV prevention and treatment to be realized and for global control of the HIV pandemic to be achieved. Effective combination prevention and treatment approaches are feasible, can be tailored for cultural competence, can be cost-saving and can help address the unmet needs of sex workers and their communities in ways that uphold their human rights.
To address HIV among sex workers will require sustained community engagement and empowerment, continued research, political will, structural and policy reform and innovative programming.
But it can and must be done. Women, men, and transgender persons who engage in sex work face disproportionate burdens of HIV, HIV risks and lack of access to essential services.
This is true in low, medium and high income countries, in concentrated HIV epidemics and in generalized ones. Improved efforts by and for people who sell sex can no longer be seen as peripheral to the achievement of universal access to HIV services and to eventual control of the pandemic.
