Do Australian female commercial sex workers still harbour sexually transmissible infections?

For at least the past few centuries, female commercial sex workers (CSWs) have been viewed by governments, churches, and much of the public as spreaders of sexually transmissible infections (STIs), and all manner of sanctions – including criminal ones – have been aimed at this workforce, often with no evidence that suchmeasureswere effective fromapublic health perspective. The HIV era has more recently sharpened the focus on sex workers around the globe, with good evidence that sex work can indeed be one of the many drivers of increasing rates of HIV incidence in a population. With this in mind, programs that aim to reduce high STI – including HIV – rates in CSWs in resource-poor settings have been studied and shown to be effective.1,2 Australia used to see high rates of bacterial STIs in CSWs, but the days of 10 % of brothel workers contracting gonorrhoea each week in the cours