HEALTH-ARGENTINA: Women Most at Risk for AIDS

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Sep 16 1997 (IPS) - Poor, young mothers, many of them with little education, have emerged the social group most at risk for AIDS in Argentina, but many of them still believe that the disease is a male problem.

“I tell my sons when they go out dancing, to use condoms, and I tell my husband the same thing”, said one women at a seminar ‘Safe Sex’ organized by the Foundation for Research on Women. , She expressed little concern about her own vulnerability.

Some 63 percent of women in the poor sector of society lacked basic information on protection from the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) the seminar heard. When the men go out, they should protect themselves, the wives say. But these women do not take the same precautions when they themselves have sex with their husbands.

Social workers explained that when AIDS first appeared on scene in Argentina in the 1980s, it was associated with homosexuality, and it was believed to affect only men. Later, it was linked to “promiscuity” and prostitution and when AIDS began to affect women, it was associated with “deviant” sexual behavior – such as in the case of prostitutes, drug addicts, or pregnant women who carried the HIV virus and who passed it on to their children.

Only recently – with new anti-viral treatments showing advances in the fight against the disease – have women with AIDS become more visible. These are women who – because they were not considered to be in any ‘risk group’- thought that the problem would never affect them.

“I heard about AIDS, but I always thought that it was something that homosexuals got. I had no idea that it could happen to me,” said Lorena Cebolla, 21, who became infected at the age of 15 when she had sex with her first partner.

As a result of that relationship, Lorena has a 6-year-old daughter, who is not infected. Lorena lives with her parents, who help her raise her daughter and contribute to the expensive treatment with a combination of anti-viral drugs.

“In Argentina, like in many other countries, women are being infected at much faster rates than men. In 1988, for every 14 men who contracted AIDS, one women would become infected. By 1994, it was one woman for every four men”, Mabel Bianco, a public health doctor, observed.

Bianco also is president of the Foundation for Research on Women, a non-governmental organization which publishes a monthly magazine called “Sidamos” and which promoted the creation of a network of associations that work together against AIDS.

According to Sidamos, there are more than 14,000 people with AIDS, “though underreporting is considerable in this country.” The majority of those infected are men, but AIDS is spreading faster among women, especially within the category of heterosexual transmissions. Some 67 percent of women AIDS victims are aged under 30.

“With the increase in heterosexual infections, women’s vulnerability began to receive attention, and that was when it was discovered that the majority of women affected are married or in stable relationships,” Sidamos said. “The majority has not had more than one or two sexual partners in their lives.”

Many of the women at the ‘Safe Sex’ seminar confessed that they preferred not to ask their husbands to use condoms because they feared their spouse would think they have been with other men.

The identification of the disease with men, and with behavior considered “deviant” diverted the objectives of prevention campaigns, which at first did not clarify that AIDS could affect the entire society, deleagtes said.

Studies showed that prostitutes and homosexuals have noticeably reduced their incidence on the total number of people infected, while those who were not considered vulnerable to AIDS because they had a stable, heterosexual relationship, are today becoming infected because they have not taken precautions.

According to the results of a study conducted this year in Brazil 42 percent of people infected worldwide are women. But of the 7,000 new infections that occur every day, 50 percent affect women. In addition, two thirds of the women infected are young, poor, married, non-drug users, and have not had multiple sex partners.

Worldwide statistics correspond with those in Argentina, where the same social sector is being surprised by the disease. Here, the level of education of people with AIDS has been increasingly lower since 1990, and the difference is greater among women.

However, the absence of prevention campaigns directed at this sector is alarming, according to the Foundation, which demonstrated in 1996 that barely 15 percent of the women in one of its workshops had any knowledge of their vulnerability to the disease.