Growing in women

A recent report from the United Nations expresses that women have equaled men in relation to AIDS.  Half of adults infected  with HIV (the virus which causes AIDS) in the world are women.  This shouldn’t be a surprise.  It was only a matter of time for AIDS to go from a disease that originally infected white homosexual men, to a disease transmitted heterosexually throughout the world.

In the last decade, the rates of HIV infection in Latin American women grew exponentially.  In Argentina, for example, between 1988 and 2001 the woman/man ratio changed from one sick woman for every 20 men, to one woman for every three men.  Most of the women infected are heterosexual and do not use intravenous drugs.  Many are married or maintain stable relationships throughout time.  Others are young women pushed to sexual labor due to poverty.

Despite the statistics, there are few changes in the way the disease is discussed or faced, and there is little acknowledgment of how the perverse gender inequalities feed the epidemic’s dissemination.  Machismo and the stigma in Latin America associates AIDS as a disease of homosexuals and places women in a big problem.

Collaborated in this article: Dra. Mabel Bianco

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