Sex workers lack food for taking HIV drugs during COVID-19 - The Associated Press

The lockdown in Rwanda has kept many of her customers away, she said, so she has less money to buy food.

Studies have shown that food insecurity is a barrier to taking the drugs daily and can decrease their efficacy, affecting not only sex workers but anyone where food — or the money to buy it — is scarce.

Among sex workers in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, “most who are living hand-to-mouth have been lamenting that it’s making it difficult to adhere to treatment,” said Talent Jumo, director of the Katswe Sistahood, an organization for sexual and reproductive health.

“Sex workers are among the most marginalized groups,” they wrote, adding that “it is crucial that disruption to health services does not further reduce access to HIV treatment.”.

“Sex workers are part of the society and they deserve to live a healthy life,” Kagaba said.

In Migina, an entertainment area in the capital, Kigali, Mignonne acts as a leader of 60 sex workers, reminding colleagues with HIV to take their antiretroviral therapy and visit health centers every month.

“We are seeing sex workers in Africa being denied the support others are given, like food,” UNAIDS chief Winnie Byanyima said this month.

“We are engaging in unsafer sex practices because we can’t be able to access prevention tools or to drugs that we are used to,” Grace Kamau, a Kenya-based coordinator with the African Sex Workers Alliance, told a COVID-19 global webinar for sex workers last month.

“We try to mobilize food for sex workers, but they are many and we cannot feed all of them,” she said