The sun-splashed Caribbean's growing sex tourism industry is contributing to one of the region's grimmest problems -- ?the world's second-highest rate of AIDS/HIV infection.
Prostitution catering to sex-seeking tourists and a growing trend called "rent-a-dread" has helped push the Caribbean AIDS/HIV infection rate higher than in any area of the world save sub-Saharan Africa, regional experts say.
The Caribbean AIDS crisis is an ominous one for the tourism industry, the region's leading money-maker built and marketed on sun, sand, sea and sex.
Sex tourism involves men travelling to poor Caribbean countries, where the regional average annual income is about US$3,000, in search of prostitutes.
The "rent-a-dread," phenomenon sees fair-skinned North American and European women seeking exotic, dark-skinned Jamaican men wearing dreadlock hairstyles for sex, Ian Edwards, a Washington-based spokesman for the Organization of American States, told a conference on sustainable tourism held in Jamaica.
"There's a mystique that apparently comes attached with the dreadlocks. I've seen it here and I've seen it in Barbados and it is not rare," Edwards said.
In the Caribbean, 2.4 percent of people aged 15 to 49 live with the HIV virus or AIDS itself, according to last year's figures from the World Health Organization.
That infection rate trails only sub-Saharan Africa, where 29.4 million people -- ?including 8.8 percent of the people in that age bracket -- ?are infected.
By comparison, the infection rate in Western Europe is 0.3 percent and in North America it is 0.6 percent in the same age group, according to the UN figures.
More than 501,500 Caribbean residents have the AIDS virus, according to the Caribbean Epidemiology Center, or CAREC, in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.
"Sex tourism is a growing reality and denying it won't make it go away," said Lelei LeLaulu, president of Washington-based Counterpart International, a non-profit group. "It's tourism that's designed and packaged for direct physical contact with a local or locals as opposed to eco-tourism."
Countries in the region heavily dependent on tourism and most affected by the AIDS epidemic include the Bahamas, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Turks and Caicos, Jamaica, St Martin and Tobago, according to the CAREC research.
"The spread of AIDS has become a threat to regional development and regional security in the Caribbean," Anthony Bryan, a Caribbean analyst at the University of Miami, wrote in a research paper.
Researchers say cultural factors contribute to the spread of AIDS in the region. Caribbean men typically have multiple sexual partners and do not like to use condoms, they say.
And some infected Caribbean women are middle-aged, married for many years and unable to ask their husbands to use condoms.
"It is an enormous health issue. It affects lost revenue, general health, the local communities and local culture," LeLaulu said.
But sex tourism is believed to have little impact on the AIDS spread in Haiti, which is the worst hit Caribbean country, or Cuba.
Haiti has about half of Caribbean AIDS/HIV infections and is plagued by poor education and poor health care, but has few tourists.
Cuba has the lowest rate of AIDS in the Caribbean, thanks to a harsh policy of locking infected people away in sanatoriums and the near-absence of hard drugs.
Cuba has become the main Caribbean destination for sexual tourism since the collapse of Soviet communism plunged the island's economy into crisis and forced many Cuban women to work the streets for dollars, risking disease.
Flights from Europe are packed with men seeking sex or romance with Cuban women in Havana.
But experts say that sexual tourism is not the main cause of AIDS in Cuba since the trade is mainly heterosexual and 70 percent of the 4,000 AIDS cases in that country are among the gay community.
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