OUAGADOUGOU, Dec 12 (AFP) - African man got a bashing at a major conference on AIDS here Wednesday, where he was branded a feckless, walking HIV risk.
Females delegates to the UN-backed annual forum on AIDS in Africa slammed the continent's male-dominated culture as a stealthy killer that had brought the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) into millions of homes.
"In sub-Saharan Africa, 28.1 million people have HIV, 55 percent of whom are women. In no other continent on the world is the number of infected women so preponderant," said Marie-Louise Ndala Musuamba, president of the Court of Appeal in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
"The irony is that women are considered by men to be vectors of the virus. It is the other way round. They are victims."
In a presentation that earned her a rousing, emotional response from fellow women delegates, Ndala Musuamba painted a picture of a continent where women were widely regarded as chattels, mired in poverty and poor education, condemned to a life of menial labour and endless child-raising.
Combine this forced subservience with male promiscuity, ignorance and coercion and it became easy to understand why African women had become the virus's easiest target, she said.
The biggest obstacle of all, women said, was male attitudes to sex: the refusal to wear a condom; intimidation of young girls into having sex at an early age; polygamy; rape; and superstitions whereby sex with a virgin is deemed purifying.
"Young women are biologically more vulnerable than young men to becoming infected," said Karusa Kiragu, a researcher with a Nairobi-based non-governmental organisation, the Population Council.
She cited studies suggesting that a non-HIV woman is between two and four times likelier to catch the virus from having unprotected sex with an infected man than if a non-HIV man has sex with an infected woman, mainly because of the higher counts of virus in sperm as compared with vaginal mucus.
Philippe van de Perre, researcher at Montpellier University Hospital in southern France, said many African women had to run a gauntlet of taboo, male opposition and financial worry just to get access to HIV tests, counselling and the simplest drugs.
This pitiful array of obstacles simply helped the virus to be transmitted from mother to child, in the womb and through maternal milk, he said.
Finding solutions, though, depends more on practical work rather than grandiose declarations, said workers with grass-roots organisations.
Alice Lamptey, head of the Ghana chapter of the Society of Women with AIDS in Africa (SWAA), said 63 percent of Ghanaians with HIV were women, most of them teenagers or in their twenties.
"Most men do not want to use condoms and in Ghana when it comes to sexual relationships, women do not have power to negotiate. In our culture it is accepted that men can do what they like.
"So what we see is that ordinary women are faced with infection. We had to find a way to protect women, and we found the female condom."
Vigorous campaigning to get the female condom used, and heavy subsidies by the Ghanaian health ministry and UN agencies has brought down the price of the device from one US dollar to the equivalent of five cents.
Two million were sold last year, making Ghana the biggest user of the female condom in the world. Demand is so big that stocks often run out, Lamptey said.
011212
AF011263
Copyright © AFP or Agence France-Presse, 2001 - AFP stories and photos shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium. AFP news material may not be stored in whole or in part in a computer except for personal and non-commercial use. AFP will not be held liable for any delays, inaccuracies, errors or omissions in any AFP news material or in transmission or delivery of all or any part thereof or for any damages whatsoever. As a newswire service AFP does not obtain releases from subjects, individuals, groups or entities contained in its photographs, graphics or quoted in its texts. Further, that no clearance is obtained from the owners of any trademarks or copyrighted materials whose marks and materials are included in AFP photos or materials. Therefore you will be solely responsible for obtaining any and all necessary releases from whatever individuals and/or entities necessary for any uses of AFP stories, photos or graphics. http://www.afp.com/
ÆGiS is made possible through unrestricted grants from Boehringer Ingelheim, the National Library of Medicine, and donations from users like you. Always watch for outdated information. This article first appeared in 2001. This material is designed to support, not replace, the relationship that exists between you and your doctor.
©1990, 2001 - ÆGiS. ÆGiS presents published material, reprinted with permission and neither endorses nor opposes any material. All materials appearing on ÆGIS are protected by copyright as a collective work or compilation under U.S. copyright and other laws and are the property of ÆGIS and the Sisters of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, or the party credited as the provider of the content.
