Newsday - July 7, 2000
Laurie Garrett, Staff Correspondent

"But the women said no," Coll-Seck recalled in an interview in her office at the Geneva headquarters of the UN AIDS Programme. Lacking financial independence, and unable to control their mates' use of condoms, the women told Coll-Seck that they were helpless, trapped in marriages that could literally kill them.

A University of California in San Francisco team doing research in Zimbabwe recently found that urban men consider condoms and microbicides acceptable except when the sex partner is their wife.

"Let me tell you, sweetheart, educated as I am, as much as I know about AIDS, I cannot tell my husband to use a condom. I cannot," Marvelous Mhloyi, dean of the School of Population Studies at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare, said. "It's very difficult to remain in a marriage without trust."

The usual pattern is that when married men are promiscuous, they become infected and then bring the virus home to their wives. That's what happened to Beatrice Were, president of the National Community of Women Living with AIDS, or NACWOLA, in Uganda. Were, whose husband died of AIDS in 1991, left her an HIV-positive widow with two children.

"Most women are still economically dependent on their men," Were said. "So it's difficult for them to negotiate condoms. They are afraid they will be thrown out. And men control the money. It's the man who must decide if he is going to buy a condom."

Every one of the NACWOLA women interviewed by Newsday said they had tried to save themselves from their husbands' viruses, but could not: They said the men refused to wear condoms when they had intercourse with their wives because the condom is a contraceptive. And if there had been a microbicide available that, too, would have been unacceptable-if the husband knew it was used. A survey by Dr. Angella Muchini of the University of Zimbabwe revealed that many men would object to anything that would moisten a woman's vagina during sex.

Ten years ago Joyce Mubiliu learned that she had AIDS, which she got from her husband who died in 1989. Mubiliu speaks with a raspy voice that is punctuated by coughs. When her husband died, Mubiliu says, she had four children to raise and no means to earn a living.

"For me, I think it is only women who have the problems," declared Judy Naziwa. Her husband died of AIDS in 1990, leaving Naziwa with HIV and four small children to feed.

The only easy solution to women's vulnerability would be a vaginal microbicide that a woman could insert prior to intercourse, offering safe and effective protection against HIV infection. Such a product, if it existed, would "make it possible for AIDS to be eradicated," insists Rose Bulya Kizito of the AIDS Support Organization in Kampala, Uganda. "If a woman is given something she can use, without negotiating with a man, she will use it. It would be as important a weapon against this virus as a vaccine."

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