Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are very, very common. One million people get infected with an STI every day, according to the World Health Organization. Many are easy to treat with antibiotics, or should be. These include gonorrhea, syphilis, and chlamydia. Like nearly all bacterial infections, they can and have begun to evolve resistance to antibiotics. The threat: these infections may again become untreatable, as they were in the days before antibiotics.
Sex workers have a very high risk of catching these infections.
So if sex workers have a higher risk of sexually transmitted infections, shouldn’t they get specialized treatment? It sounds like a good idea, says Salome Manyau, PhD, a researcher in the Department of Global Health and Development and the Faculty of Public Health and Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
But things haven’t always worked out the way global health nonprofits and medical experts thought they would. Dr. Manyau spent months living among sex workers in Harare, Zimbabwe, and what she discovered may surprise many. It’s not so easy to just tell people to practice safe sex, and focusing treatments on one particular group of people can cause unexpected problems.
Listen as she tells One World, One Health host Maggie Fox what she found out in her research on antibiotic use among some of the most stigmatized people in the world.