Tallinn, Estonia
Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn, announced this week that it was offering free medical checkups to all prostitutes in an effort to stop the spread of AIDS. The number of Estonian citizens known to be infected with HIV topped 2,500 last year. That may not sound like much, but Estonia has a population of less than 1.4 million. That puts the country’s rate of infection at more than one in every 1,000 people—20 times the average for European Union countries. Health centers said they would treat any woman or girl who said she was turning tricks. “We assume that people are not going to lie about being prostitutes,” one clinic director told the daily Postimees.
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