Britain Funds Study into How the Fishermen's Wives Never Catch Aids

Mike Pflanz
Telegraph.co.uk
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Kisumu (Kenya):
Britain is funding a study into how tens of thousands of HIV-positive Kenyans have mysteriously not passed the virus to their husbands or wives.Almost £400,000 was set aside from Britain's annual £4 million HIV and Aids grant to Kenya to research some 160,000 "discordant couples" in Nyanza province on the shores of Lake Victoria. Rates of HIV and Aids are among the highest in the world along the lake's bush-lined shores.
Kisumu, the provincial capital, and its surrounding lowlands are some of Kenya's most densely populated regions. Local customs are thought to boost infection rates. The dominant Luo tribe have an aversion to circumcision and practise a tradition where if a husband dies, his brother inherits his wife.
Yet limited early surveys showed that up to 40 per cent of people with HIV in the area had not passed the virus to their partners, despite regularly engaging in unprotected sex over long periods of marriage.
Dec 13, 2005