Originally published June 22 2005
Women now make up more than half of HIV and AIDS-infected population
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A press release from John Hopkins University says that women, who used to be the group least affected by HIV, now are the fasted growing group of new infections.
A Johns Hopkins physician and scientist who has spent a quarter-century leading major efforts to combat HIV and AIDS worldwide has issued an urgent call for global strategies and resources to confront the rapid "feminization" of the AIDS pandemic.
In an article appearing in the journal Science online June 10, Thomas C. Quinn, M.D., professor of infectious diseases at Hopkins and a senior investigator at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, reports that women have in the last 20 years moved from those least affected by HIV to those in whom the disease is spreading fastest.
"There has been a shift in the AIDS pandemic, and the victims are different now," says Quinn, senior author of the Science article.
Internationally, Quinn and his team have led clinical trials of the first effective treatments that prevent HIV from replicating, helped establish laboratory and treatment facilities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and Uganda, and counseled other governments across Africa and Asia about control efforts.
In the new article, he argues that women deserve a separate strategy because of the increasing and disproportionate numbers becoming infected, and the social consequences of so many young mothers dying and leaving behind children who may also be infected as well as orphaned.
He also points out that medical research suggests hormonal and developmental factors place young women at greater risk than men for contracting the virus when exposed to it.
In sub-Saharan Africa, 60 percent of people living with HIV are female, Quinn says, and in South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe, young women ages 15 to 24 are three to six times more likely to be infected than men.
The reasons for the rise in female cases differ among countries, with 97 percent of female HIV infections in the United States due to heterosexual transmission (81 percent) and intravenous drug use (16 percent).
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