WASHINGTON — Tackling the female side of the AIDS epidemic means going far beyond today’s global focus on pregnant women, specialists told the world’s largest AIDS meeting Wednesday.
Already women make up half the world’s HIV infections. Adolescent girls are at particular risk in the hardest-hit parts of the world, and protecting them requires addressing the poverty, violence and discrimination that too many women experience around the world, said UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Geeta Rao Gupta.
“These adolescent girls and young women, our sisters and daughters, represent an unfinished agenda in the AIDS response,” she said.
“The pandemic has a woman’s shape,” said Annah Sango, 24, of Zimbabwe, who learned she had HIV when she was pregnant and watched her husband die of AIDS a few months later. “We have to reshape our response if we’re going to turn the tide.”
Topping the world’s anti-AIDS goals for women is the effort to nearly eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV. The number of babies born with HIV has been dropping steadily for several years as more infected women receive AIDS drugs during pregnancy and while they’re nursing — 57 percent of them last year, according to the United Nations.
But UNICEF HIV adviser Dr. Chewe Luo said few countries continue providing the life-saving drugs for mom after her baby is weaned.
Some 4.8 million people ages 15 to 24 are living with HIV, and two-thirds of them are girls or young women, Rao Gupta added.
Sexual violence and conditions of poverty that frequently lead to girls marrying in their teens for economic security, often to much older men, are chief risks in developing countries, she said.
Even in the U.S., violence and poverty can play an important role. Here, one in four people living with HIV is female, the vast majority are African-American or Hispanic — and they’re more likely to die of the virus. Increasingly, new infections are concentrated in poor, often inner-city, communities where access to health care is limited.
