High Risk Environment:

Poverty not only imposes on people patterns of living which increase their risk of exposure to HIV, but it often robs them of the knowledge or the means to protect themselves. To make the matters worse, in many part of the developing world, educational facilities are poor and illiteracy rates high (especially among women), make it even more difficult to reach a large segments of population with information about AIDS. Despite the severe handicaps, surveys show that many developing countries have achieved remarkable successes in informing their population about HIV/AIDS. How ever their efforts continue to be undermined by chronic shortages of the basic necessities for HIV prevention such as disposable syringes, test kids for screening blood, rubber gloves and most important of all condoms. Under such circumstances, the concept of “high risk environments” is at least as important to the analysis as “high risk behavior”, since people in such environments can do little to protect themselves against HIV infection, or matter how well informed or well intentioned they are.