NEW YORK, Aug 1: Young girls who have been trafficked abroad into prostitution are emerging as an AIDS risk factor in their home countries, according to an American Medical Association study released on Wednesday.

The study says that the girls who were forced into prostitution before age 15 and girls traded between brothels were particularly likely to be infected,. Shunned by their families and villages on their return, they sometimes end up selling themselves again, increasing the risk.

The study, in the Journal of the American Medical Association (AMA) concerns girls from Nepal trafficked into bordellos in India but the problem is also emerging elsewhere, said the lead author, Jay G. Silverman, a professor of human development at Harvard’s School of Public Health.

Girls from China’s Yunnan Province sold to Southeast Asian brothels, Iraqi girls from refugee camps in Syria and Jordan, and Afghan girls driven into Iran or Pakistan all appear to be victims of the same pattern, he said, and are presumably contributing to the HIV outbreaks in southern China, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

“Most authorities fighting human trafficking don’t see it as having anything to do with HIV,” Dr Silverman said. “It is just not being documented.”

Aurorita M. Mendoza, a former Nepal coordinator for UNAIDS , the United Nations AIDS agency, called the study “very important”, said the New York Times.

“It’s the first I know of that’s linked HIV to sex-trafficked girls,” she said.

In Nepal the government estimates that it has only about 10,000. The official UNAIDS estimate is 75,000, but that may be too high, given that some previous estimates for other countries have been wrong. One month ago, for example, UNAIDS cut its official estimate for neighbouring India by 56 per cent, to about 2.5 million infected, more than anywhere except South Africa and Nigeria.

Working in a brothel in Mumbai — India’s financial capital and one of the world’s largest cities — was a risk factor in itself, the study found. The youngest also tended to have been in multiple brothels and in them for more than a year, raising their risk.

India’s epidemic, the study said concentrated among prostitutes, truckers, men who have sex with men and people who inject drugs, is most common in its industrialised south and in the heroin-smuggling areas near Pakistan and Myanmar, not in regions bordering Nepal.

Rights agencies said a decade ago that up to 7,000 women from Nepal were trafficked to India each year; civil strife has presumably increased that number.