The migrant workers who have returned this season to often-isolated camps and barracks scattered over San Joaquin County farmland are at high risk of contracting and carrying HIV as they move across state and national lines, say public health advocates who face a range of obstacles in their work to prevent the virus’s spread.
Outside one barracks this week, two workers leaned over a wire laundry line as Rudy Ceja, an HIV educator with the San Joaquin AIDS Foundation, told them that millions of people have the virus and don’t know it.
In the county Public Health Services van parked behind him, outreach workers were waiting to administer free HIV tests. No blood would be drawn, Ceja promised - the test is oral - but the men would be asked about their sexual history, if they had ever had sex with another man, for example.
They laughed uncomfortably.
“These things happen,” Ceja said. Or, he said, a prostitute might have visited the camp. “She’s not going to tell you she’s positive.”
California has been the destination of the largest share of undocumented immigrants to the United States. Health officials on both sides of the border have linked that migration to the spread of HIV and AIDS in Mexico, especially within the country’s rural villages.
A number of factors make Mexican migrants vulnerable to infection. At the same time, migrants have limited access to health care and education.
A 2007 report from the Office of the Mexican Secretary of Health notes that migrants who leave Mexico for the United States are typically poor and poorly educated. Once here, they encounter relaxed social norms. They are apart from their families - and the company of women - for long stretches of time, and many engage in risky sexual behavior.
In 2001, the University of California-led California HIV/AIDS Research Program surveyed of hundreds of Mexicans from Puebla and Morelos, two states with high migration numbers.
The results, published in the November 2004 issue of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, found that immigrants to the United States had more sexual partners than those who did not leave Mexico. They also were more likely to have had intercourse with sex workers.
Source: Record Net
WHAT TO DO NOW?