Good article on HIV and feminism

[Guest Loss]

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U.N. Links HIV Fight to Women's Rights

 

By EMMA ROSS, AP Medical Writer

 

LONDON - The global battle against HIV (news - web sites) will ultimately fail unless serious progress is made on women's rights in the developing world, the United Nations (news - web sites) says.

 

The pandemic is increasingly taking on a feminine face as it enters its globalization phase. and the lack of women's equality — from poverty and stunted education to rape and denial of women's inheritance and property rights — is a major obstacle to victory over the virus, according to the latest global HIV status report published Tuesday.

 

Violence against women is a worldwide scourge, but it is feeding the HIV epidemics in the developing world, where women and girls often don't have the power to say no to sex or to insist on condom use.

 

For millions of other women, sex is their only currency.

 

"The fact that the balance of power in many relationships is tilted in favor of men can have life-or-death implications," concluded the report by UNAIDS (news - web sites). "These factors are not easily dislodged or altered, but until they are, efforts to contain and reverse the AIDS (news - web sites) epidemic are unlikely to achieve sustained success."

 

Nearly 50 percent of the 39.4 million people infected with HIV worldwide are women. In regions where the epidemic is mature, more women are infected than men, and in countries where epidemics are just beginning, new infections among women outnumber those among men and the gap continues to widen.

 

East Asia experienced the sharpest increase in the number of women infected with HIV in the past two years — 56 percent. Eastern Europe and Central Asia come next, with infections among women rising 48 percent in the past two years. In the Caribbean, which is the second worst hit area of the world after sub-Saharan Africa, young women are twice as likely as men their age to become infected.

 

Part of the reason for the rapid increase is that it is physically easier for women to get HIV through intercourse than it is for men to get it from women. However, in many parts of the world, especially in Asia, more women than men are now getting the disease because the virus has escaped the confines of brothels.

 

Twelve years ago, about 90 percent of HIV transmission in Thailand was occurring between prostitutes and their clients. But now, about half of all infections are occurring in the wives of men who visit prostitutes.

 

In many parts of the world, stressing marriage and long-term monogamous relationships doesn't protect women from AIDS because they are unable to control whether they have sex. The approach — favored by the American anti-AIDS package — also could backfire in areas where being married actually increases the risk of contracting HIV, research has found.

 

One study conducted in several areas of Kenya and Zambia found that among teenage girls, HIV infection levels were 10 percent higher for married girls than for those who were sexually active but not married. Similar findings have been reported in Uganda.

 

Married women in some African countries are in more danger of HIV than unmarried ones because young women often marry men much older than themselves — for financial security — and these men are more likely to have had other partners and thus been exposed to HIV, the report found.

 

AIDS has to be the catalyst for women's rights in the developing world, UNAIDS chief Dr. Peter Piot told The Associated Press.

 

"There was reason enough before AIDS, but now the link between the whole gender inequality and death has never been so direct as with AIDS," Piot said. "If AIDS is not enough to shift the agenda for women, then what is enough?"

 

"It's time now for the women's movement and the AIDS movement to find each other, and that hasn't happened yet," Piot said. "Ultimately, without putting women at the heart of the response to AIDS, I don't think we will be able to control this epidemic."

 

Regardless of your feelings on the war on terror, if it's executed properly, the spread of AIDS should slow tremendously. It's amazing and saddening how many people have become infected with the virus over the past 30 years.

 

Where does the responsibility lie to slow down the spread of this disease? Obviously, we have more freedoms in America than in other countries, and it's much easier to control the spread here, although people not practicing safe sex in this day and age stuns me.

 

I think, at least on a national level, the two main carriers of the disease are heterosexual black women and gay men, or at least that was the case last time I read any studies on the subject. Education is part of the solution, but isn't the answer in itself, as 1991 saw a major increase in education about the disease.

 

I'm at a loss as to how to handle the issues in Africa.

 

As for the article itself, feminism has admittedly taken a more narrow approach in the past 20 years, when it's obvious there's still more work to do internationally.

[2GOLD 0]

I'd say education was important, but there is no reason people shouldn't know about HIV/AIDS in this country anymore. I think one of the major issues is HIV/AIDS is now falling into that "people who drive drunk cause they don't think they will ever crash" catergory of American thought. People know they might get it but they don't think they will so they don't care.

 

I don't think we can do anything else on a national level. You are going to have some people who just don't care. They aren't going to care about catching it until they actually do. We can educate for the rest of time and you will still have people who think, "pfft, I'll never get it."

 

As for the rest of the world...I have no idea. I really don't. We can't give them free drugs to handle the problem, we can't educate them on the drug since we'd have to start from the ground of education just to teach some (keyword) what the hell we are even talking about.

 

Short of finding a cure, which will never happen since apparently the strain keeps evolving on us, I don't think we can do anything about it.

[Vyce 0]

I'm at a loss as to how to handle the issues in Africa.

 

You're not the only one.

 

Africa's AIDS problems are so enormous that I don't know if ANYONE can solve them.

[Guest Salacious Crumb]

Africa is just a lost cause for the most part. It's so backwards there I don't know of anyway to get it under control. You might be able to educate them but I wouldn't hold my breath since I'd imagine people are set in their ways and stubborn.

[edotherocket 0]

Well it doesnt help when Thabo Nbeki goes around saying there isn't any connections between HIV and AIDS.

[iggymcfly 0]

Short of a totalitarian government which forcibly AIDS tests everyone in the country, and then quarantines the half of the country with AIDS from the half of the country without or at least tattoos those with HIV, I think it's impossible to solve the AIDS problem in Africa. The proportion of the problem in that are is so out of control that we can't even properly comprehend it here in the States.

[Sass 0]

Africa is a lost cause. We just better hope the disease doesn't mutate or something. On the topic of women, Africa just ended apartheid like 15 years ago so things might take a while to improve for them.

[Highland 0]

It's a lost cause because religious organizations refuse to allow proper sexual education and contraceptives to be distributed throughout Africa. Also the myth about have sex with a virgin curing you of AIDS also plays a factor, but again this is due to ignorance.