HIV infecting women faster than men in some parts of Asia
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) - Women in some areas of Asia are catching HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, at a faster rate than men, a U.N. agency says.
Women are particularly vulnerable to HIV due to insufficient access to prevention services, inability to get men to practice safer sex and a lack of HIV prevention methods they can use on their own, said ESCAP, the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.
They also lack adequate knowledge about AIDS, ESCAP said in a news release.
ESCAP helped organize a meeting on Women and AIDS in Bangkok on Monday to mark International Women's Day.
In the Mekong River region - southern China, plus the countries of Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam - 30 percent of infected adults are women, but the numbers are rising, said ESCAP.
In Thailand, one of the countries worst affected by AIDS, 6.9 times as many men as woman were infected with HIV in 1990, UNAIDS official Adriana Gomez-Saguez told The Associated Press.
This meant that only 12.7 percent of HIV infections were found among women.
But by last year, the ratio of male to female infections had narrowed to 1.8 to 1, meaning the percentage of Thais with HIV who were women had risen to 35.7 percent.
Gomez-Saguez said UNAIDS projects the ratio to narrow further to 1.5 to 1 by 2005, meaning that 40 out of every 100 Thais infected with HIV would be women.
"The velocity of the infections in women is increasing in all the countries of the Mekong region, including China,'' she said.
Reliable information about woman's health is difficult to gather in the area, she said, but was able to cite Vietnam as another example, where women made up 22.7 percent of the HIV-infected population in 1992, and are projected to account for 27.8 percent this year.
"Globally, women account for half of the 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS,'' said ESCAP.
"In sub-Saharan Africa, 58 percent of those living with HIV were women as of end 2003.''
ESCAP noted that one country in the greater Asia-Pacific area, Papua New Guinea, has an equal number of women and men HIV victims. - AP
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