By Mica Rosenberg
MEXICO CITY, Aug 6 (Reuters) - Mexican men
living and working illegally in the United States are more likely to
sell their bodies for sex, take drugs or frequent prostitutes than they
would have been in their homeland, increasing their risk of AIDS
infection, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.
And if they
are deported, they can take the virus back home with them, the
researchers told an international conference on AIDS in Mexico City.
"They are in a new environment, they are discriminated against, they
are living in harsh conditions, sometimes just in boxes covered in
plastic near the farms where they work," said George Lemp of the
California HIV/AIDS Research Program at the University of California,
who studied 458 Mexicans before and after they left their homeland.
"When people live that way, they engage in high-risk behavior," Lemp said in an interview.
About 11 million Mexicans live in the United States, more than half of
them undocumented, and a recent U.S. crackdown on illegal immigrants
and increase in deportations could make the danger of HIV infection
worse, conference delegates said.
The men in the study were
three times more likely to have sex with a prostitute in California
than they were before leaving Mexico, Lemp's research showed. They were
five times more likely to have sex while using drugs or drinking and 13
times more likely to have sex with another man.
The men were
more likely to use condoms in the United States, according to the
study. But their risk-taking behavior nonetheless increases the
possibility of infection, Lemp said.
In Mexico, 0.3 percent of the population is infected with HIV. In the United States, the infection rate is 0.6 percent.
Hispanics make up about 15 percent of the U.S. population. They account
for 18 percent of new AIDS diagnoses, according to the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, but determining the infection rate
among illegal Mexican immigrants is difficult, as many do not seek
testing.
Steffanie Strathdee, a professor at the University of
California, San Diego, found that residents of the border city Tijuana
who injected drugs and had been deported from the United States were
four times as likely to be infected with the AIDS virus as drug users
who had not been deported.
New outbreaks of the virus are also being detected in small towns far from the border, researchers said.
Indigenous Zapotec migrants from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca
contracted HIV in the United States but were often too afraid of
deportation to seek medical care, a joint study by Mexico's health
ministry and the California HIV/AIDS Research Program found.
If
they return to their villages, they can infect their partners if they
do not know, or are unwilling to reveal, that they have the disease,
ministry researchers said.
