Labor & Employment Law

No Silver Bullet in the Fight Against HIV/AIDS

By admin

The following is an excerpt from the latest report by Bernard Pollack, who is taking a leave of absence from the AFL-CIO to travel through Africa, and Danielle Nierenberg. Read the full post and more at their blog, Border Jumpers.

In the fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS, there is no silver bullet.

As we travel throughout sub-Saharan Africa we are seeing dozens of innovative ways that organizations, governments and individuals are working to fight the disease.

The AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, in cooperation with labor unions across Africa, has developed a number of programs to prevent the spread of the disease among workers:

At Johnson Matthey in Germiston, South Africa, where 600 workers assemble catalytic converters for automobiles, the Solidarity Center is working in partnership with the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA) to provide free HIV/AIDS education and HIV counseling and testing to several thousand manufacturing workers a year.

Following the HIV/AIDS education session, many workers voluntarily agree to be tested. At the testing area, we spoke with registered nurse Dorothy Majola, who said that before workers are tested they are given private counseling, and then she administers two separate tests?both with 99.99 percent accuracy?to ensure correct results within 10 minutes of being tested.

A second program involves transport workers. At Katuna, Uganda, one of the cities along the Northern Transport Corridor, which stretches from Mombassa, Kenya, to Djibouti, truck drivers once waited for days for their trucks to be cleared by customs before entering Rwanda.

Boredom?and drinking?often led to unsafe sex with commercial sex workers at the truck stops along the highway. As a result, truck drivers have one of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS in Eastern Africa. Unfortunately, the virus doesn’t stop with them and is often spread to their spouses.

The Solidarity Center and Uganda’s Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union (ATGWU) worked with the government to reduce the amount of time it takes for the drivers’ paperwork to go through, which reduced the amount of free time they have on the border.

The Katuna resource center also offers HIV/AIDS education and free testing to truck drivers and local community members. The Solidarity Center has similar programs in Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.

We also visited an orphanage for children whose parents died of AIDS-related illnesses outside of Harare, Zimbabwe. The orphanage is supported in part by the Solidarity Center’s partner, the Zimbabwe Chamber of Informal Economy Associations (ZCIEA). The union also provides HIV/AIDS education and HIV counseling and testing to workers.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on May 24, 2010 (boomark / email).