S Abedin, A Khan. The Internet Journal of Health. Our aim in this study is to explore the socio-economic and health status of urban street sex workers SSWs. Physical growth and health status of SSWs are depicted through the body mass index, body fat level, blood pressure, hypertension and many other health related covariates. Thus, socioeconomic, demographic, and health related data were collected from SSWs from Rajshahi city of Bangladesh.
Our study explores that more than half of the SSWs are suffering from back pain, joint pain, vaginal pain, and waist pain. By using both the logistic and linear probability models we have found some common factors which are hypothesized to be significantly affect these pains.
Moreover, over body fat level is supposed to be more prominent in the severity of physical pains. Some curses like illiteracy, financial hardship, unsafe and unprotected over-sex with many physical complications are depriving them from minimum standard of urban life.
Unsafe sex and careless lifestyle become a part of their life. Commercial sex plays a critical role in the heterosexual transmission of HIV. Hong and Li conducted behavioral studies on commercial sex workers in China. According to Hong and Li , sex workers in China are young, mobile, most of them have both commercial and non-commercial sex partners with low rates of consistent condom use and high rates of STD infection.
Risks associated with the brothel-based sex and knowledge in sexual health of sex workers were also emphasized in many literatures. In most cases, sex workers were found with a very little knowledge about safe sex Huang et al, A study on Chinese entertainment workers conducted by Yang and Xia, explored the risky sexual behavior and lack of knowledge on healthy sexual partnership.
