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Top officials at the United Nations Commission on Population and Development, at its yearly meeting are focussing on the negative effects of HIV/AIDS on population dynamics, including population losses and decreased life expectancy, as well as the pandemic's links to increased extreme poverty, stalled economic growth and poor reproductive health in many parts of the world.
The global HIV/AIDS pandemic is taking a catastrophic toll on women and girls. The number of HIV infections among women and girls has risen in every region in recent years, and in sub-Saharan Africa, women and girls constitute nearly 60 percent of those living with HIV. In some countries, the HIV infection rates for girls are many times higher than for boys. The rising number of HIV infections among women and girls is directly related to violence…
Boon Srimai's tranquil life was shattered three years ago when death struck her family twice. Within a space of months in 2002, her 34-year-old son and his wife died of AIDS, leaving behind their young daughter Methini. Suddenly Boon, who was 60 at the time, found herself being a mother all over again, having to care for the orphaned child. She is not the only grandmother shouldering such a responsibility in her village of mostly rice farmers on…
In a community hall in Soweto, South Africa's largest township, 20 men and women try to imagine life in the other gender's shoes. The workshops are largely facilitated by volunteer "peer educators," usually young black men motivated by their own exposure to domestic violence and HIV/AIDS and convinced of the need for change.
Participating in the morning panel discussion of the Commission on the Status of Women, Louise Arbour, High Commissioner for Human Rights said nothing illustrated more starkly the disastrous effects of gender discrimination than the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Since the founders of the United Nations noted their faith in "the equal rights of men and women" on the first page of the UN Charter 60 years ago, studies have shown that "there is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women," Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today.
Increased condom use and premature deaths from AIDS-related diseases might be playing more of a role in declining HIV prevalence in Uganda than abstinence and fidelity, according to a study presented Wednesday at the 12th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
A conference on HIV/AIDS among women and girls in the Middle East and north Africa has heard a call for more to be done to help this vulnerable group. Although incidence rates are still low compared to the rest of the world, health practitioners warned that this would not be the case in a year's time.
A large, multisite trial designed to examine the safety and preliminary effectiveness of two candidate topical microbicides to prevent HIV infection has opened to volunteer enrollment. The trial, sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, represents a partnership among various research institutions in Africa and the United States.
In Ghana, the Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre otherwise known as the Gender Centre recently organised a workshop for various women's groups in the country to deliberate on how to deepen local efforts at empowering women to negotiate safe sex. This article is dedicated to examining some of the striking statistics and issues about women, their sexual rights and HIV/AIDS around the globe, in Africa and in Ghana.
Despite the near universal embrace of standards for protecting childhood, a new UNICEF report shows that more than half the world's children are suffering extreme deprivations from poverty, war and HIV/AIDS, conditions that are effectively denying children a childhood and holding back the development of nations.
This year's World AIDS Day is an occasion to recognize the burden that women and girls bear in the age of HIV/AIDS, but equally, to celebrate their achievements in the fight against the epidemic. Women are our most courageous and creative champions in the fight against HIV/AIDS. In most countries and communities I have visited around the world, it is women's voices that are heard above all others; women advocates and activists who are moved to act…
The Aids pandemic rampaging around the globe will not be stopped without radical social change to improve the lot of women and girls, who now look likely to die in greater numbers than men, United Nations agencies said yesterday.
Nearly half of 37.2 million adults living with HIV are women, figures show. The steepest increases have been in East Asia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, with rates in women outstripping those in men in some regions.
The World Health Organization has appealed to countries for placing primary focus on prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV to check spread of HIV-AIDS worldwide. "Since mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) is the most important source of HIV infection in children, it is pertinent that the issue should be given top priority," the WHO said in a statement issued here on Wednesday.
Populations Services International (PSI) and Tebelopele Voluntary Counselling and Testing Centre have collaborated in a campaign 'Because You Care' aimed at motivating men working away from the families, couples in serious relationships and women planning a pregnancy to get HIV counselling and testing. The new campaign falls under the 'Show You Care' campaign that reinforces individual ownership in the fight against the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Countries have made impressive progress in carrying out a bold action plan that links poverty alleviation to women's rights and reproductive health, emphasizes The State of World Population 2004 report by UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. But a shortfall of the funds pledged by international donors is undermining critical efforts to provide family planning services, reduce maternal deaths, prevent HIV/AIDS and meet the needs of young…
Clinical trials of HIV vaccines requires greater participation of women and adolescents, the WorldHealth Organization (WHO) said Tuesday in a press release. Experts attending a recently-concluded HIV vaccine trial conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, said studies show that women are at least twice as likely to become infected with HIV as their male counterparts.
Heads of State and government and senior United Nations officials will be among those meeting in Athens on 14 August, during the Olympic Games, at a special round table discussion of the contribution that sport can make to addressing global problems.
Although the risk patterns that favor the expansion of HIV are very widespread, the majority of the countries of Latin America have still not faced a large-scale AIDS epidemic, according to a publication by the Pan American Health Organization and the World Bank. But recent trends indicate that if the countries of Latin America do not take adequate prevention measures promptly, the incidence of the disease could hit epidemic proportions, the book…