Young Lao women are contracting HIV/AIDS after selling sex to some of the thousands of workers who have come into the country in recent years to work on Chinese-funded projects like mines and hydroelectric power dams, an NGO director told Radio Free Asia.
The rising trend has also been spotted in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, a gambling and tourism hub catering to Chinese visitors in northern Bokeo province that has earned a reputation as a haven for criminal activities, including prostitution.
“Their customers are Chinese guys who seem to not like to use condoms,” the director of the Association of People Living with HIV/AIDS, or APLPlusLaos, told RFA on Tuesday.
In some instances, a man will pay a Lao woman for sexual services, and then arrange for his co-workers to also have sex with the woman, she said, requesting anonymity for security reasons.
“They share the girl with 10 men,” the director said. “They take turns.”
Additionally, a large potash mine in central Khammouane province that employs several thousand Chinese laborers has drawn impoverished young women looking to sell sex, sources told RFA last year.
Risk of expanded epidemic
The number of people testing positive for HIV has ticked up every year since 2022, according to Laos’ Center for HIV/AIDS.
According to the World Bank, just 0.42 percent of adults in Laos tested positive for HIV in 2024.
But unsafe sexual practices and the use of injected narcotics have put the country in danger of an expanded epidemic, health officials said.
The trend was discussed at a National AIDS Committee meeting held in December in Vientiane, where officials acknowledged that a lack of proper sexual education in remote areas has also been a factor.
“They have forgotten that HIV/AIDS still exists,” the APLPlusLaos director said. “The government doesn’t have the budget to produce sexual education programs or introduce projection awareness among young Laotians.”
Some information about how to prevent HIV/AIDS transmission is shared on social media, but not all young Laotians in rural areas can access social media – and the rural areas are where the mines and hydroelectric dams are being built, she said.
Public disdain toward those with HIV/AIDS has also kept many people from seeking out testing, a Ministry of Health official told RFA.
Translated by Khamsao Civilize. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.