PAKISTAN: Lonely truck drivers face HIV/AIDS threat

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PAKISTAN: Lonely truck drivers face HIV/AIDS threat

14 Nov 2006 19:37:47 GMT
Source: IRIN


LAHORE, 14 November (IRIN) - Leaning against his brightly painted truck, Muhammad Rafiq, 30, looks furtively at the two condoms he holds in his hand. "I plan to use these soon, but I hope I can remember to do so when the time comes," he says, a little shyly.

Rafiq, from the town of Kohat in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP), is an exception. A long-distance truck driver who regularly transports goods from the southern port city of Karachi to Lahore and up to Peshawar along thousands of kilometres of highway, he says he "quite often" uses a condom, and generally only has sex with women.

There are thousands of truck drivers like him, many of them young men from northern parts of the country. Displaced from their home, families and social environments, they are one of the groups most vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, mainly because of the dangerous behaviour they engage in, including multiple sex partners and drug use.

The huge truck terminal at Mauripur in Karachi, one of the busiest in South Asia, sees 20,000 trucks pass through it each day. The terminals in Lahore, including the ones located at Badami Bagh in the congested heart of the city where Rafiq parks his truck, are less busy, but still accommodate thousands of the giant, rumbling vehicles, gaudily decorated with lights, coloured paper and mobiles that spin in the slipstream, arriving from destinations outside the city each day.

According to limited research carried out on the subject, very few among the thousands of long-distance truck drivers in the country are as cautious as Rafiq, who says he picked up information on HIV/AIDS from television, and is anxious to protect his wife from the "incurable illness."..........