HIV now a bigger threat to women than men
UN calls for social change as infections soar among females

This story is from a couple weeks ago that I forgot to post. Needless to say, this is an important issue that should be at the top of everyone's agenda right. This severely worries me as a feminist human rights supporter. :0


Sarah Boseley, health editor
Wednesday November 24 2004
The Guardian


The Aids pandemic rampaging around the globe will not be stopped
without radical social change to improve the lot of women and girls,
who now look likely to die in greater numbers than men, United
Nations agencies said yesterday.

Infections among women are soaring, from sub-Saharan Africa to Asia
to Russia. What began as a series of epidemics among men - in some
regions gay and bisexual men, in others men who frequented sex
workers or male drug users - has spread to their female partners who
are biologically more easily infected.

In many countries, women's subordinate status, and their lack of
education and economic power have made it impossible for them to
negotiate sex with men or to ask for the use of condoms. Yesterday
the UN agency set up to combat the pandemic, UNAids, called for all
that to change in the interests of checking the spread of a disease
which killed 3.1 million adults and children last year.

"We will not be able to stop this epidemic unless we put women at the
heart of the response to Aids," said UNAids' executive director,
Peter Piot.

At the launch of the UNAids annual report on the pandemic yesterday,
actor Emma Thompson, who is a founder member of the Global Coalition
on Women and Aids launched this year, put it in starker fashion.
"There are some countries where women are an endangered species -
they will disappear from the face of the earth," she said. "I think
this is the greatest catastrophe that the human race has ever faced."

Across the globe, 39.4 million people, including 2.2 million
children, are carrying the HIV virus and will die without treatment
to contain it - up from about 36.2 million two years ago. Only one in
10 in developing countries can get the drugs they need.

Last year, 4.9 million people were newly infected and 3.1 million
died. In some parts, such as sub-Saharan Africa, the numbers living
with HIV appear to have stabilised, but only because as many are now
dying as are acquiring infection.

In the UK, HIV continues to spread. UNAids says it "has become the
fastest-growing serious health condition". A report today from the
Health Protection Agency will confirm the trend. Last year there were
7,000 new diagnoses, taking the total numbers living with infection
well above 50,000.

The numbers of women affected globally are rising faster than those
of men, now making up nearly half of the total. In sub-Saharan
Africa, where the pandemic is furthest advanced, the transition is
complete - 57% of those with HIV are women. In Zambia, Zimbabwe and
South Africa, 77% of all young people infected virus are women.
Across nine countries in that region, the infection rate in the whole
population is one in four.

In other parts of the world, there have been large hikes in the
proportion of women affected. In east Asia, there has been a 56%
increase in the number of HIV positive women in the past couple of
years. In Russia, where the epidemic began in young, mostly male
injecting drug users, the proportion of women infected has gone up
from 24% to 38% in just 12 months.

In every region of the world - including the US, where Aids is one of
the biggest killers of African-American women, and Europe - it is the
same story, said Kathleen Cravero, deputy executive director of
UNAids, yesterday, and it means that a new strategy must be adopted.

"The prevention strategies now in place are missing the point when it
comes to women and girls," she said. The ABC mantra favoured by the
US - abstinence, be faithful and use a condom - is useless to women
who do not have the power to refuse sex, sometimes from an older,
sexually experienced husband who already has HIV.

Social and cultural change is the only way to check the pandemic in
countries where women have no status or power, UNAids says - although
it accepts that revolution is not on the cards.

"What we're talking about is very specific actions that are doable,
moving to a situation where every woman gets to keep her house and
her land and her furniture when her partner dies," said Ms Cravero.
"It doesn't mean turning society on its head. It means getting the
right laws in place and making them enforceable.

"We have to work against the fatalistic idea that you can never
change these things."

UNAids is urging governments to reform their inheritance laws, pass
legislation protecting women from domestic violence and help girls
attend secondary schools. A woman who has some education and some
economic power through possession of her own house and garden will be
better able to negotiate sex, said Ms Cravero. "We have to turn
abstinence on its head and fight for the right of every woman to
abstain when and if she wants to, because right now she doesn't have
that right."

Ms Thompson related stories from three trips to Africa of sugar
daddies who offered schoolgirls meals or trainers for sex. "I knew of
a girl who gave her body to a man because he gave her an apple,
because nobody had ever given her anything before," she said.

Mothers who were desperate for money would gamble that if they were
infected with HIV, they could stay alive long enough to bring up
their children. "I would sell my body if I had to do it to feed my
child," said Ms Thompson.

She suggested that Tony Blair could contribute by going to Ethiopia,
where she had recently been, and publicly taking an Aids test. "I
think it is going to take big gestures like that. Examples have to be
set by men of power."

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited


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