Not a MyNAP member yet? Register for a free account to start saving and receiving special member only perks. Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. At present, this fear appears to be unfounded, at least in the United States. The evidence instead suggests that prostitutes' risk of transmission is more closely associated with Mug use than with multiple sexual clients.
The evidence also indicates that the risk of transmission through sexual contact is greater ire the personal relationships of female prostitutes than in their paying ones. For this reason, and because the future dynamics of the epidemic are still unclear, there is a continuing need to monitor any fixture role that prostitution may play in transmitting HIV.
The committee appreciates this distinction but has chosen to use the terms interchangeably. None of the terms are intended to convey any judgment about individuals who work in this area.
Because so little is known about male prostitutes, the committee has restricted its focus to females. One study of male prostitutes recruited from the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, found that 27 percent were infected. Compared with seronegative respondents, male prostitutes who were HIV positive had spent more years as prostitutes, were more likely to self-identify as homosexual, and had had more encounters involving receptive anal intercourse in the month prior to the interview Elifson et al.
In addition, a recent study of prostitutes who did not use drugs found a significant relationship between infection and the number of personal i. Unfortunately, information about women who work as prostitutes is scant, and knowledge of their clients is sketchier still. Moreover, such studies cannot provide an accurate estimate of the number of women who work as prostitutes. Instead, estimates of the total population are constructed from informed "guesstimates" of knowledgeable observers or from arrest and imprisonment records that capture the subsets of female sex work- ers who are most likely to come into contact with the criminal justice system-that is, the poor, the inexperienced, minorities, drug users, and women who work the streets Turner, Miller, and Moses, Little is known about the occupational histories of prostitutes, but anecdotal evidence suggests that this is a dynamic population.
