TORONTO, Aug 18, 2006 (AFP) - From a disease that 25 years ago seemed only to target gays, AIDS today principally has women and children in its cross hairs, according to evidence and testimony presented at the 16th International AIDS Conference here.
"HIV/AIDS is progressively taking on the face of a woman. It's absolutely essential that we address the special concerns of women and allow them to protect themselves," said Anthony Fauci, head of the United States' National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
On the global scale, women have now caught up with men, who in the past accounted for the big majority of HIV infections.
In southern Africa, the world's worst-hit region, the female-male rate is nearly 60-40 percent. Around the world, females account for two thirds of infections among people aged 15-24.
The reasons for why this is so are long.
One is physiology: compared with men, women are physically twice as much at risk of becoming infected when exposed to the AIDS virus.
But there are many factors that have entrenched social roots.
Lack of empowerment leaves women, especially those in Africa, prey to coercive sex with an infected man. A study found that in South Africa's poorest districts, between 30 and 60 percent of teenagers aged 13-16, said they had been pressured into sexual intercourse.
Stigma against women with HIV is such that an infected woman can become an outcast. Poverty or hunger afflicting women and girls can force them into prostitution or sexual transaction.
And to protect themselves against HIV, women have to depend on men's goodwill, for today the only reliable shield is a condom.
Workshops, seminars and speeches at the AIDS conference, which ends in Toronto on Friday, showed the breadth and depth of this phenomenon.
They also gave voice to rising anger and resentment at governments and male attitudes, and demands for women to be given the means to protect themselves, through legal reform, social change and new tools such as vaginal anti-HIV gels.
"Are you ready to mobilize yourselves?" Ludfine Anyango of a Kenyan NGO, ActionAID, yelled to a room crammed with impassioned activists. "Are you ready to make your leaders angry enough to hand rights to the women?"
Musa Njoko, who 10 years ago became the first woman in South Africa to publicly acknowledge that she had HIV, electrified a meeting of several hundred delegates with her tale.
"As a mother I was told to go home and tell my son, who was two at the time, that I was dying.
"I was also told to tell the rest of my family: and that was my mother. My 72-year-old mother had to find a way to deal with it," said Njoko, whose life was saved by antiretroviral drugs.
"Marriage is a licence to do what you want with your wife," was the acid comment of Nafis Sadik, a Pakistani woman who is the UN's special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Asia.
The spotlight has also shifted to the smallest, least visible victims of the AIDS pandemic.
Africa's army of children orphaned by AIDS, which stood at 12 million last year, could reach more than 15 million by the end of the decade, said a report presented by UNAIDS, the UN Children's Fund (Unicef) and President George W. Bush's emergency AIDS programme.
Children who lose their parents to AIDS, or live in a household where their parents are sick with HIV, are likely to be plunged into a life without adequate education, prey to poverty, stigma, sexual abuse and exploitation, they said.
"We must do more to help. Millions of children affected by AIDS are out of school, growing up alone, vulnerable to poverty, marginalisation and discrimination," Unicef Deputy Executive Director Rima Salah said.
"Children who have lost parents and caregivers are left without their first line of defence."
Then there are the more than 2.3 million children who have the virus, most of whom contracted it from their mother while still in the womb or in childbirth.
"Every minute, a child under the age of 15 is infected with HIV. AIDS kills over 1,000 children every day and claims roughly half a million young lives every year," said the aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).
Studies cited in a presentation by the Global AIDS Alliance on Thursday painted a nightmarish tableau of rape and assault visited on women and children, and the role that this played in helping HIV spread.
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