"This incident shows us that if the oil and gas industry can't contain leaks in supposedly less risky places like the North Sea then there's no way they should be allowed to drill in fragile and high risk places like the Arctic".
Interventions targeting high risk places in addition to high risk groups are likely to reach a higher proportion of these women.
Efforts at HIV prevention that focus on high risk places might be more effective and less stigmatizing than those targeting high risk groups.
The detailed coding was done with a focus on the sections relating to perceived condom availability/accessibility and perceived high risk places, which were the predetermined sub-themes.
Our findings from Mbarali, Kapiri Mposhi and Malindi indicate that there is a need for a better system for monitoring the condom availability in high risk places.
The need to reach people who are likely to take risks but who do not belong to traditional high risk groups has increased the interest in targeting HIV prevention at high risk places rather than specific population groups.
We wanted to study high risk places in Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia, and in Livingstone, a border city and the main tourist spot in Zambia, which are two urban communities where the HIV epidemic has developed differently.
From an equity perspective it is important that efforts to provide condoms in high risk places target the whole range of venue types where people meet new sexual partners.
In Mbarali there were no specific guidelines concerning how often health workers should supply condoms, whereas in Kapiri Mposhi, NGOs were supposed to make weekly visits to high risk places.
Although we have not identified any studies that have compared the effectiveness of condom provision in high risk places versus health clinics, we believe that condom availability in places where people decide to have sex, including informal drinking places, is of vital importance because sex is often not planned.
The assumption is that in countries where the HIV prevalence is high, focusing on high risk places such as venues where people meet new sexual partners would be even more effective in reducing the HIV transmission rate than targeting interventions just at perceived high risk groups.
