Inter Press Service - March 16, 2000
Thalif Deen

Madhu Bala Nath, speaking on behalf of UNAIDS and the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), told the Commission on the Status of Women that structures that rendered stability to the socio-economic fabric are being torn apart with the onslaught of AIDS and the spread of the human immune-deficiency virus (HIV), the primary AIDS carrier.

"The epidemic in Africa has confronted development workers with a dilemma - the dilemma of a silent breakdown of an informal social institution, the extended family," she said.

A study of the socio-economic impact of HIV on rural households in Uganda reveals that there are far more women who have lost their husbands to AIDS than men who have lost their wives. The study found that only five out of 62 were widowers. The rest were young widows from 15 to 35 years of age. Nath said she had interviewed a group of young women living with HIV/AIDS in India and Nepal - and all of them were widows under 24 years of age.

"And as female headed households are increasing in a number of African countries, the family composition in Asia is changing, with more and more women living with HIV/AIDS - and as single deserted women," she added.

Every minute, she said, five people under the age of 25 are being infected. And more than half of these are women living in the developing world. She also pointed out that there is a very sudden shift of gender roles because of the AIDS epidemic. In Zimbabwe, for example, women are moving into the carpentry industry as men are getting sick and dying.

"The challenge for us as change agents is to see how we can help women move successfully as they adjust to these changing roles," Nath asserted. A study of the disease in one of the Asian countries, she said, has also revealed that women living with HIV/AIDS had acquired knowledge about the protective aspects of condom use only after they had contracted the virus. Nath said this mutating virus envelops in its fold two most insidious areas of oppression and inequality - gender and sexuality.

"HIV/AIDS has today more than ever focussed our attention on the fact that gender is a structural problem, not just a social problem," she added. The World Health Organisation (WHO) says the response to AIDS must be gender-based for three reasons: first, because unequal gender relations are driving the epidemic; second, women are disproportionately affected by the epidemic; and third, clinical management has been based primarily on research undertaken on men.

The WHO is calling for the development of a prevention method which is cheap, safe, effective - and under women's control. The AIDS epidemic in women is overwhelmingly heterosexual, the WHO says, and almost entirely so in Africa and South and Southeast Asia.

In other areas, a proportion of women are infected through: sex with a bisexual or drug injecting partner; their own injecting drug use; heterosexual sex without these factors; and blood transfusion (particularly in developing countries where blood is not routinely screened).

Aurorita Mendoza of UNAIDS told the Commission that AIDS is extracting a serious toll on women, as more and more young girls, wives, mothers and older women are being infected every day.

Although the spectre of AIDS had been recognised at the 1995 women's conference in Beijing, he said, the enormous challenges it now imposed on millions of people world-wide had then been only at the periphery of the imagination. The Beijing programme of action - which was aimed at improving the lives of women - had not completely captured the links between the AIDS epidemic and strategic areas beyond women and health, he said.

Mendoza called on the international community to intensify actions to facilitate the access of women and men to various methods of prevention: ensure that basic health and social services to women included HIV prevention education, counselling, testing and treatment; and provide economic, psycho-social and community support systems for women.

He also said there was an urgent need to increase funding for research and development of microbicides, as that would provide women with one more way of reducing their risk within a context of unequal power relations. (END/IPS/HE/td/da/00)

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