The Tijuana-San Diego international border crossing is the busiest in the world (approximately 42 million crossings per year), and public health officials are concerned that the high frequency of crossings facilitates the spread of infectious diseases between the two countries.
Public health researchers long thought Mexico dodged the HIV/AIDS bullet with only 0.3 percent of the population infected in 2006. However, the drug and sex trades along Mexico’s northern border seem to be worsening the HIV/AIDS situation there, according to Dr. Steffanie Strathdee, a professor at University of California San Diego and chief of the Division of International Health and Cross Cultural Medicine.
Strathdee’s research group measured HIV prevalence rates between three and 12 percent among Tijuana’s sex workers and drug addicts in recent years. Dr. Remedios Lozada, a cross-border colleague of Strathdee’s, estimates that up to one in every one hundred twenty-five people aged 15 to 49 in Tijuana has HIV.
Strathdee and Lozada collaborate on a cross-border health program, hosted by the non-profit PrevenCasa, which targets Tijuana’s most vulnerable to infection by HIV in the city’s thriving sex tourism district and its drug addict-populated border canal. Funded by a United States Agency for International Development grant, PrevenCasa sends mobile units to the streets to distribute condoms, new syringes and information about the disease.
Lozada says those most likely to contract HIV in Tijuana are heroin and crystal meth users, immigrants who have been deported, and women whose husbands leave them to pursue work illegally in the U.S.
This video follows PrevenCasa’s mobile units to the Tijuana river canal, which itself crosses the U.S.-Mexico border, and the city’s red light district, which is within walking distance of the massive Tijuana-San Ysidro border crossing.
