Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1995. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia, Inc. - 17 Nov 1995
Margaret Orgill / Reuter

"The most important risk factor for a Latin American woman is being married," said Fernando Zacarias, coordinator of the Pan American Health Organization's regional program on AIDS.

Married women have become the latest victims of the disease because many are unable to persuade their spouses to wear condoms, Zacarias said in an interview at the Fourth Pan American Conference on AIDS. Health workers say many who try to make their husbands wear condoms risk violence or suspicion that they are being unfaithful.

"The infection doesn't come from something she has done but because of the lack of equality in the relationship between men and women," Zacarias told the four-day seminar attended by health experts from more than 30 countries, prostitutes and nuns running a home for children with AIDS.

The Pan American Health Organization estimates that two million men, women and children in Latin America and the Caribbean are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Although this is not as high as the rate in Africa and Southeast Asia, the epidemic is taking a high toll in Caribbean countries, Zacarias said.

The disease is expected to spread rapidly among women elsewhere in the region, spurred by rising intravenous drug abuse in the southern cone, especially Brazil. To help contain the epidemic, health workers said AIDS prevention campaigns must be redesigned to be aimed at women most at risk -- housewives and office workers -- and not at the traditional targets, prostitutes, who are already aware of the dangers.

"The rise in AIDS among normal women breaks the myth it only affects prostitutes and drug-users," said Jadira Rodriguez, who runs a health program for women workers in Puerto Rico. "Prostitutes know how to protect themselves."

In Chile, nearly half the women infected with AIDS last year were housewives. Prostitutes accounted for 13 percent of cases, health figures showed.

Chilean prostitutes are giving AIDS prevention classes to women living in poor urban areas, said Elizabeth Axia of the Chilean Association for Women's Rights. "We have to use condoms with our clients. Now we're showing other women how to use them."

In many countries AIDS prevention campaigns have been hindered by opposition from the Catholic Church, which views them as encouraging promiscuity, activists said.

"The church has so much influence that it puts obstacles in the way of giving complete information," said Dixie, a Chilean woman who has HIV and runs a support group for AIDS sufferers. She asked that her full name not be used.

One Catholic-run television channel in Chile refused to run the government's last anti-AIDS campaign as it considered the images too suggestive.

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