Women, hit hard by AIDS, need own UN agency

	Tweet

Women and girls are far more vulnerable to AIDS than men and need their own U.N. agency to defend them, just as the U.N. children’s fund UNICEF protects young people, a top U.N. envoy said on Friday.

“What has happened to women is such a gross and palpable violation of human rights that the funding must be found,” said Stephen Lewis, Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s special envoy for AIDS in Africa. “We must right the wrong.”

Lewis, just back from a trip to Lesotho and Swaziland in southern Africa, said 56 percent of pregnant women between 25 and 29 years old in Swaziland were infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, according to a recent government survey.

"That’s the highest prevalence I have ever encountered in the last five years. The mind fractures at the thought of it,” he told a news conference.

In Lesotho, roughly 30 percent of girls 15 to 17 years of age were infected, he added. “This is obviously a disaster for the country, but it reconfirms yet again the wildly disproportionate vulnerability of women and girls.”

An estimated 57 percent of infected adults 15 to 49 years old in Lesotho are women, while 43 percent are men.

Lesotho and Swaziland broadly reflect what is happening across Africa, the continent hardest hit by the pandemic, he said, arguing that the situation would be different had a well-funded and powerful agency representing women’s interests been in place.

“Not only would the women of Lesotho and Swaziland now be far better off, but we could at this point mount an unbridled campaign to demand that gender equality be legislated and enforced in these two countries,” he said.

“Years from now, historians will ask how it was possible that the world allowed AIDS to throttle and eviscerate a continent—and overwhelmingly the women of that continent—and watch the tragedy unfold in real time while we toyed with the game of reform.” he said.

Across all of sub-Saharan Africa, home to more than 60 percent of the world’s infected individuals, an estimated 4.6 percent of young women age 15 to 24 are infected with HIV, compared to 1.7 percent of young men, according to the latest available U.N. statistics.

RELATED STORIES:
FDA Advisory Panel Approves Home HIV Test Kit   FDA Approves New In-Home HIV Test   Home HIV test advances   Survey Reveals Support for Over-the Counter HIV Testing   F.D.A. Panel Weighs Preventive Use of H.I.V. Drug   Stem Cell Therapy Shows Promise in Fight Against HIV   Progress against HIV thwarted by patients’ unmet needs   California to test pill for HIV prevention   Mechanism of HIV spread has potential for future drug therapy   Seeking HIV treatment clues in the neem tree   HIV Prevention Pill’s Value Varies by Target   Using AIDS drugs to prevent infection: a bargain?

Comments

[ + Post Your Own ]

Now you're in the public comment zone. What follows is not Armenian Medical Network's stuff; it comes from other people and we don't vouch for it. A reminder: By using this Web site you agree to accept our Terms of Service. Click here to read the Rules of Engagement.

There are no comments for this entry yet. [ + Comment here + ]