Leading cause of death in women

Women at risk

A UN program has warned that HIV has become the leading cause of death and disease worldwide among women of reproductive age.

At the start of a 10-day conference in New York, UNAids launched a five-year action plan addressing the gender issues which put women at risk. One of the key issues, it says, is that up to 70 percent of women worldwide have been forced to have unprotected sex. UNAids says such violence against women must not be tolerated.

"By robbing them of their dignity, we are losing the opportunity to tap half the potential of mankind to achieve the Millennium Development Goals," said Executive Director Michel Sidibe to the BBC.

"Women and girls are not victims, they are the driving force that brings about social transformation," he said.

The agency says that experiencing violence hampers women's ability to negotiate safe sex.

HIV around the world

Women, UNAids said, continue to be disproportionately affected by HIV/Aids. Since the beginning of the HIV and AIDS epidemic, well over half a million people have died of AIDS in America - the equivalent of the entire population of Las Vegas. There are currently more than one million people living with HIV and AIDS in America and around a fifth of these are unaware of their infection, posing a high risk of onward transmission, AVERT reports.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 60 percent of those living with HIV are women and in Southern Africa, for example, young women are about three times as likely to be infected with HIV than young men of the same age.

The program by UNAids - which will include improving data collection and analysis of how the epidemic affects women, and ensuring the issue of violence against women is integrated into HIV prevention programs - will be rolled out in countries including Liberia. More than 90 percent of the world's 16 million injecting drug users are offered no help to avoid contracting AIDS, and governments that ignore them risk a spiraling public health crisis, drugs experts have said.

A "critical health problem" is growing in places like Russia, China, Malaysia and Thailand, they said, where drug users are a neglected population in the fight against AIDS and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes it. Of the estimated 16 million injecting drug users worldwide, three million are thought to be HIV-positive, and drug users are thought to account for 10 percent of all those living with HIV.

In Russia, for example, around a million injecting drug users are living with HIV and some 65 percent of new HIV infections there are thought to come from injections, Reuters reports.

UK data

A poll for MAC Aids Fund in the UK recently found that three-quarters of British women have never been tested for HIV, with many seeing no need to. A total of 73 percent were not checked for HIV, while 62 percent think HIV and Aids do not affect their community.

Some 82 percent of British women had sex without a condom, with 63 percent saying it was because they were in an exclusive relationship. Meanwhile, 58 percent of women do not have annual HIV tests because they do not consider themselves at risk, Press Association reported.

In 2008, almost 7300 people were diagnosed with HIV in the UK, almost three times the number a decade before. MAC Aids Fund warns that, nearly 30 years from the beginning of the epidemic, HIV services do not respond to the specific needs of women and girls.

Jodie Humphries

Jodie Humphries graduated from Bath Spa University with a BA Hons in Creative Writing in 2008. She has worked for GDS Publishing for the digital group since July 2009. She has previous experience with writing for the web, running her own website since April 2007.

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