Women and AIDS: have you heard us today?
Globally, the percentage of adults living with HIV who are women stabilized in the late nineties around 50%. The most recent global percentage is from 2007, 50.2%. Currently, around 15.5 million women are living with HIV globally of which more than three-quarters reside in the WHO African Region.
Great disparities can be seen at regional levels: among the adults in the WHO African Region there is a consistent trend of more women living with HIV than men, with a percentage hovering around 60% in the last five years. It is also the only region where more women than men are living with HIV/AIDS. The region with the lowest proportion of women living with HIV/AIDS is the Western Pacific Region, with about 28% of the adults with the virus being female.
Women are physically more susceptible to HIV infection than men, and gender-based violence makes them even more vulnerable. Violence against women is well recognized as a violation of human rights and also now as a public health issue – one that dangerously intersects with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. For many girls and young women, their first sexual encounter is often coerced; the experience or fear of violence is a daily reality, and increasingly, so is HIV/AIDS.
In the three stories below, we hear women talk about how they have overcome violence and gender inequality, and how they are living with HIV/AIDS.
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