NELAMANGALA, India, Feb 6 (AFP) - Trilok Singh, 24, says he treats sex workers with "love and affection" and uses a condom. If his fellow road warriors did the same, India could drastically cut the spread of AIDS.
Singh is one of thousands of truck drivers and their helpers who stop daily for food, alcohol, work and sex at so-called halt points like this eight-kilometer (five-mile) stretch of National Highway Seven north of Bangalore.
More than two-thirds of three million long-haul truckers on India's 8,000-kilometer highway network for months at a time have frequent unprotected sex, according to a study cited by international AIDS charity AVERT.
That makes them 10 times more likely to be infected with HIV, the virus that causes fatal AIDS, according to the TCI Foundation, an HIV prevention advocacy arm of one of the country's largest trucking companies, Transport Corp of India (TCI).
Only 11 percent of the truckers use condoms, the AVERT study found.
Low condom use is feeding the AIDS epidemic in India, home to one in every eight people infected with HIV worldwide, or five million people. Truckers account for as much as 12 percent of the infected adult population, TCI says.
Many truckers in India do not have repeated unprotected sex.
But there is still is an urgent need to educate them about condom use and test for open-sore sexually transmitted diseases that can increase the transmission of HIV by 100 times, says Biswajit Panda, regional coordinator for TCI in Bangalore.
"We don't want to stigmatize the truckers," Panda says. "They work hard and the road can be dangerous. Our aim is to give them the information to protect themselves."
At Nelamangala, TCI counselors gather truckers for a picture show of male and female genitalia infected by sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea.
Some of the truckers joke when the pictures flip by, but many others pay attention and stay on for the condom-use demonstration.
A nearby clinic examines those truckers who may have seen something familiar in the pictures.
Panda says this program is repeated at high-risk halt points around the country with a simple message -- if you don't want to look like this, use a condom.
Manjit Singh, 50, does not visit some of the 40-odd women sex workers or 30 eunuchs at Nelamangala, but understands why truckers need to know about condoms and sexually transmitted infections.
"It is being spread through the country and we need to stop it," says Singh, a burly Sikh from Punjab state.
TCI's Nelamangala project is funded by an eight-million-dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's AIDS initiative in India. It has recorded 500 cases of sexually transmitted infection in the past six months at Nelamangala, Panda says.
Truckers can also get screened for HIV on request.
To extend the reach of the program, 36 truckers and the brokers who give them work have been named "peer educators" to spread the message of condom use.
The program also provides antibiotics at cost to treat infections and provides local shops with condoms to sell, at two rupees (five cents) for a pack of four in basic latex or 16 rupees (37 cents) for the fancy ribbed variety.
"We don't want to give away condoms because truckers can afford them," Panda says.
At a hamam (bath house) run by eunuchs at the edge of the halt point, a full hot water bath and massage costs visiting truckers 20 rupees (45 cents) -- but condoms are free.
"We pass out the condoms to protect us," a eunuch named Banu says.
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