By Lyndsay Griffiths

MAZABUKA, Zambia, Dec 12 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Sugar brought a rush of people and prosperity to the drab highway stop in southern Zambia they now call “Sweet Town” – and with that trade came AIDS.

To mine copper or cut cane, outsiders descended on scruffy, fast-growing towns like Mazabuka, hoping to make a new life and where the men went, a sex industry followed with local women touring bars, inns and truck stops to sell sex to newcomers.

It was a perfect storm for the AIDS epidemic.

“There was a huge mobile population and the district was simply too overwhelmed with men who came without their spouses,” Jabez Kanyanda, an expert on AIDS, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation during a tour of the Southern Province of Zambia where he leads an HIV prevention programme.

Zambia was one of the world’s worst hit countries, part of an African “AIDS belt” that left millions dead, with 70,000 people dying a year in the southern African nation at the height of the epidemic in 2003, according to UNAIDS data.

HIV prevalence along key transport routes was especially high, as men and women moved en masse seeking a better life.

“At the peak of the epidemic, no treatment was available. We had a lot of orphans, a lot of widows, a lot of widowers,” said Kanyanda.

“The doctors knew, of course, but there was nothing they could do … Every day, you’d pass the graveyard and see people moaning, wailing – yet another funeral.”

Topics
hum-dis