Women main victims of Aids
2004-03-09 13:26
Special Report
An Mpumalanga clinic that serves a population of less than 40 000 people has reported that 70% of its patients are HIV positive.
New York - Women are becoming the main victims of the global Aids epidemic, Secretary General Kofi Annan said on Monday at a UN session to mark International Women's Day.
He told a gathering attended by Queen Noor of Jordan that girls and young women now account for nearly two-thirds of people worldwide under 24 who are living with HIV, the virus that causes Aids.
At least half of all new infections are women, which he said indicated a "terrifying pattern" that has changed the way the disease is cutting its way through communities across the globe.
"All over the world, women are increasingly bearing the brunt of the epidemic," Annan said. "If these rates of infection continue, women will soon become the majority of the global total of people infected."
He stressed that the strategy of trying to combat the illness through abstinence and the use of condoms was not "realistic" for many women, whom he said are suffering because of their inferior status in many societies.
Why, he asked, are women more vulnerable to infection despite the fact that their male partners are more likely to be the ones engaged in at-risk behaviour?
"Usually because society's inequalities puts them at risk - unjust, unconscionable and untenable risk," Annan said.
"There are many factors, including poverty, abuse and violence, lack of information, coercion by older men, and men having several partners," he said.
"Society pays, many times over, the deadly price of the impact on women of HIV/Aids."
- AFP