SEOUL, June 6 (AFP) - A 28-year-old South Korean prostitute has been arrested for having sex with thousands of clients without telling them she was HIV-infected, police said Thursday.
The woman, identified only by her family name Koo, worked in a red light street in the southern port of Yosu between October 2000 and March of this year, police said.
"She said she had had sex with up to 10 men a day. By simple mathematics she must have had received thousands of clients," a police official in the southeastern city of Gimhae said.
"More than half of her clients refused to use condoms," he said.
Health authorities in Gimhae had monitored Koo after she was first detected as having contracted HIV in 1998 but she left Gimhae without informing the authorities. The woman is now a full-blown AIDS patient, police said.
Under a law to prevent the spread of AIDS, HIV carriers can be sentenced to up to three years in jail should they engage in activities that spread the virus.
In the first three months of this year, 75 Koreans were newly confirmed infected, up 7.1 percent from the same period last year, to bring the total number of people infected with the AIDS virus to 1,319. Another 367 people are known to have died of AIDs in South Korea.
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