New UN Campaign Targets HIV Prevention for Women. 3/3/10

The proportion of women infected with HIV has risen in many regions of the world over the past 10 years

The United Nations launched a global campaign Tuesday to prevent girls and women from contracting HIV, now the leading cause of death and disease among women worldwide between the reproductive ages of 15 and 49.

The U.N. AIDS agency and Scottish singer and AIDS activist Annie Lennox unveiled a five-year action plan amid a two-week meeting to review a 1994 platform to achieve equality for women. The platform was adopted by 189 countries at a historic conference in Beijing and included a call for increased action to prevent HIV in women as well as treat and care for them.

The U.N. Millennium Development goals, adopted in 2000, include halting and reversing the AIDS pandemic by 2015.

But Michel Sidibe, the executive director of UNAIDS, said the agency's latest report in December showed the proportion of women infected with HIV has risen in many regions of the world over the past 10 years.

According to UNAIDS, HIV is the leading cause of death and disease worldwide among women of child-bearing age from 15-49. In sub-Saharan Africa, 60 percent of people living with HIV are women, and in southern Africa the prevalence of HIV among women aged 15-24 is on average about three times higher than young men of the same age, UNAIDS said.

Lennox said a "broad movement for change" is needed.

"I see this agenda for action as a great opportunity to bring the realities faced by many women and girls to the forefront and to call attention to the injustices faced by many women and girls, placing them at a bigger risk of HIV," she said.

Nearly 30 years into the HIV epidemic, Sidibe said, growing inequality between women and men and human rights violations against women including "brutal rapes" and trafficking for prostitution are putting women and girls at greater risk of HIV infections.

He told a news conference that 400,000 babies are born every year with HIV in Africa and 30 percent will die before their first birthday without medicine, "but it also means 400,000 women have not been checked for HIV" and had no treatment "to at least avoid the transmission from mother or child."

"What we are trying to do is create a new movement, to mobilize the world around a new urgency - urgency which is about stopping violence against women ... an urgency which will call for a new mobilization of leaders in order to reduce the number of new infections among girls" and will target more services to women, Sidibe said.

The Agenda for Action launched Tuesday calls for the U.N., governments and voluntary organizations to work together to combat violence against women, analyze and address the factors that prevent women and girls from protecting themselves against HIV, and scale up engagement with men's and boys' organizations to support the rights of women and girls.

Suksma Ratri, who has HIV, and is a member of Indonesia's Positive Women's Network, said she believes the agenda will help countries strengthen services for women and girls - including those with the virus that causes AIDS.

If the agenda is implemented by every country, she said, "gender inequality between men and women will slowly vanish" and women will be empowered, even HIV positive women.

Sidibe said he believes the plan will work because it was not developed just by the U.N. but by governments and voluntary groups and has a timeline with targets.

For the first time, he said, countries will be reporting back and there will be "a scorecard which can really show what type of progress has been made."