24 March 2017
Ayushi Tripathi is a student at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, a city in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh. This week, she joined 27 other students for a three-day workshop to raise young people’s awareness of their sexual and reproductive health and rights. The training was led by the Dove Foundation, a youth-led organization based in Varanasi and supported by UNAIDS. The advocacy materials used were…
8 March 2017
On International Women’s Day UNAIDS has released a new report which shows that there is an urgent need to scale up HIV prevention and treatment services for women and girls. The report, 'When women lead, change happens,' shows that globally in 2015, there were 18.6 million women and girls living with HIV, 1 million women and girls became newly infected with HIV and 470 000 women and girls died of AIDS-related illnesses.…
UNAIDS' report shows an urgent need to scale HIV prevention and treatment services for women and girls. It provides up-to-date statistics on the status of women and girls living with HIV, 18.6 million as of 2015. It highlights current global commitments for women and girls' health and development, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 2016 United Nations General Assembly Political Declaration on Ending AIDS.
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16 March 2017
First Lady [of Namibia] Monica Geingos, who is a mother of a teenager and a young adult, says the only way to get HIV-AIDS awareness through to the youth is to speak to them in their language. “I am speaking from experience,” she told local and international participants at a debate on 'Building a stronger HIV prevention movement in sub-Saharan Africa' at Swakopmund last week.
Read the full article online…
21 March 2017
Through the project called Accelerating children’s HIV/AIDS Treatment Initiative (ACT), Malawi Girl Guides Association (MAGGA) has taken a step further by lobbying adolescents aged (10-19) to go for HIV testing for them to know their status and get linked for treatment. With funding from the United States Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US president’s Emergence Plan for AIDS Relief…
21 March 2017
Outright discrimination against women with HIV in healthcare environments is a problem in Ukraine. The report Positive Women and other activists filed with the UN last month has several stories of HIV-positive women being denied access to health care because of their HIV status. The numbers tell a story of how health care providers can discriminate against HIV-positive women across Ukraine, and how many of these women…
8 March 2017
To end this unjust and daunting reality for adolescent girls and young women, the world must work faster and harder in the fight against HIV. Governments and development partners must meaningfully engage with us not only in the fight against HIV, but also in holistic aspects of development - education, economic opportunity, reproductive health. As empowered adolescent girls and young women, we will not only defeat HIV, but…
The SASA! intervention used a comprehensive approach to address intimate partner violence and HIV prevention. This report shares its impacts by comparing two groups - communities that received SASA! programming and those that did not.
"Globally, women make up one third of people who abuse drugs but just one fifth of those who are in treatment," the report states. The 'Women and Drugs' chapter provides global data on the linkages between women who use drugs and HIV (page 4).
7 March 2017
International AIDS Society (IAS) Member Viewpoint: Over the past quarter century since my HIV diagnosis, I have had the good fortune to meet hundreds of extraordinary women who also have this bug in their bodies. As one of the estimated17.8 million women living with HIV worldwide, I want to raise our voices this International Women’s Day and share the six simple things you should know about being a woman living with HIV. It…
March 2017
There are two main challenges that women face: the biological differences that make women more vulnerable to HIV infection; and the gender norms and inequality that are unfortunately still part of many societies around the world. Female sexuality is still something that is ignored or even denied in many countries. Acknowledging women as sexual beings is very difficult for many male-dominated societies, especially when they…
8 March 2017
There is a saying in South Africa: Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo. You strike the women, you strike the rock. On International Women’s Day, we want to celebrate the strong women who have always been at the heart of fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic. For more than 35 years, women have modeled strength and resilience as researchers, nurses and physicians, caregivers, volunteers, advocates, social workers, and community…
7 March 2017
The Namibia Football Association (NFA) is taking its popular development programme, Galz & Goals to the Oshana and Zambezi regions this month.
This will be done through their Football and Healthy Lifestyle Festivals. Galz & Goals combines football with life skills, HIV/AIDS and health education to create a platform through which adolescent girls can gain skills and knowledge by active participation and learn…
6 March 2017
"People who are designing the studies, who are funding the studies, need to make [enrolling women] a priority." In an interview on behalf of IFARA at CROI 2017, Andy Kaytes spoke with Rena Patel, M.D., and Monica Gandhi, M.D., about HIV in women. Studies have shown that women taking certain forms of hormonal contraceptives have a higher risk of acquiring HIV than those who do not use such pregnancy prevention. …
2 March 2017
The World Health Organization issued an updated guidance statement on its recommendations for the use of hormonal contraception by women at high risk of HIV. The update changes the WHO classification of long-acting injectable contraceptives like DMPA (also known as Depo) and NET-EN. WHO states "there continues to be evidence of a possible increased risk of HIV among progestogen-only injectable users." Based on this…
23 February 2017
The HIV situation in Uganda calls for renewed and urgent action. This is after a new study revealed that every single hour, 2 young women get infected with HIV in Uganda which puts the prevalence of HIV among adolescent girls at 9.1% compared to the national prevalence of 7.3%. This was highlighted at the end of a UNAIDS Global Review Mission to Uganda which held multi stakeholder consultations in Uganda.
Read the…
22 February 2017
Naina Khanna is the executive director of Positive Women's Network - USA (PWN-USA), a national organization that advocates for local, state, and federal policies and programs for women living with HIV. She was diagnosed with HIV in 2002 and has been working in the field since 2005. Roughly 1 in 4 people living with HIV in the United States are women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and…
17 February 2017
Sexual violence plays a significant role in HIV infection and depression, according to ground-breaking research with women living in Rustenburg. The research, conducted by humanitarian organisation Medicins sans Frontieres (MSF), involved a sample of 800 women. “Opportunities are missed each day to prevent HIV infection, psychological trauma, and unwanted pregnancy for victims of sexual violence in on the platinum…
27 February 2017
"When I found out at 14 that I was HIV-positive, I didn't think I would live to see 18, I am turning 22 this year." Since Saidy Brown tweeted those words on Friday, thousands of people have re-shared her hopeful message, with many praising her courage for speaking publicly about her own experience with the virus.
Activist Saidy, who describes herself as an HIVictor in her Twitter bio, has been speaking to the…
This executive summary provides organizations, institutions, and individuals existing guidance, new recommendations, and good practice to better address the sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) of women living with HIV (WLHIV). It is geared towards providing health care workers, programme managers, and public health policy makers recommendations to fulfill these rights and ensure WLHIV experience better care and more enabling…