If you don't see the coffin, you shed no tears. Five young women in casual clothes sit opposite them on similar benches, but behind a display window of cheap glass. They chat among themselves, brushing each other's hair or playing with the brothel dog. In the unshaded light of a pink fluorescent tube, their makeup looks coarse, their lipstick purple. One young woman wears a "Snoopy and his friends" T-shirt dress.
Over her breast is a blue, heart-shaped pin with a number. Some women wear yellow pins. These are price tags. These young women live at the brothel, a shabby building of bamboo and thatch, roofed with tin, in the Thai city of Chiang Mai. They are always on call, and each has between 10 and 20 customers a day.
In this area, in this kind of brothel, four of five women carry the AIDS virus. Thailand is in the grip of a hidden AIDS epidemic. Some 4. In June , 3 percent of Bangkok's brothel prostitutes were infected; by last December, 18 months later, the figure was But the disease, spread by the brothels, is by no means confined to them. At least 14 percent of the young men here in northwest Thailand, ages 20 to 24 -- like the ones in this brothel -- carry the virus, too.
Within six years, the World Health Organization estimates, half of those infected will be dead. In time, since AIDS is always fatal, the others will die as well. So the sexual and commercial transactions in this brothel, common throughout Thai society at every level, are a form of indirect murder or suicide.
Doctors and scientists estimate that at least , Thais are infected with AIDS, and thousands more are being infected every month. By , according to W. This is a conservative estimate. But the disease is still so new here that very few Thais have died or even fallen sick, and only a tiny number of those infected know that this modern plague is already killing them.
