A new AIDS threat is rising in India’s numerous call centers, where young staff are increasingly having unprotected sex with multiple partners in affairs developed during night shifts, a top AIDS expert warned.
While India made great strides in bringing down its HIV infection rate, the promiscuity among “call center Romeos” is a great concern, Suniti Solomon, who detected the first HIV case in India in 1986, told an international medical conference on Saturday.
The UN, however, still estimated there were some 2.5 million Indians living with HIV and AIDS.
“India has reached a plateau of the infections,” Solomon told the International Congress on Infectious Diseases, which ended yesterday.
Her concern was the call centers, where many of the young staff worked at night to correspond with the daytime working hours of their American and European clients.
“They have all the money. They huddle together in the night. They are young, they are sexually active, so naturally they start,” Solomon, who runs an AIDS center in the southern Indian city of Chennai, said in an interview.
She said at least three or four call center workers visit her clinic every week to get tested for HIV because they are worried after having unprotected sex.
It was estimated that India’s call centers employed some 1.3 million people, mostly youth fresh out of school and colleges, earning a starting salary of 25,000 rupees (US$600) a month, more than a government doctor’s paycheck.
“You will see call center Romeos are a major high risk for HIV,” Solomon said.
There were no figures for how many call center workers were infected with HIV.
Citing confessions by the visitors to her center, Solomon said groups of young men and women rented apartments along the beach during the weekends and end up having multiple-partner sex.
“If they are having sex just among themselves, and all are non-infected it is fine. But if there is one person who has gone out of this group and brought in the virus, it will spread to everyone,” she said.
While the “call center Romeo” situation is a reflection of recent liberal values, India’s anti-AIDS fight is also hampered by society’s coexisting conservatism, Solomon told the conference.
She said this is evident in Hindu activists’ opposition to circumcision — which is proven to help inhibit HIV transmission — on the grounds that it is against tradition and religion of Hindu-majority India.
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