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More women living with HIV/AIDS
Aug 18, 2007 By: Susan O'Neill(Originally published May 8, 2006)
“The numbers are staggering and almost incomprehensible,” Louise Binder says as she begins to describe the impact of HIV/AIDS on women around the world.
“Seventeen and a half million women are living with this disease today,” she says, telling the crowd gathered at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre that she is among them.
Ms. Binder, a lawyer by training, was diagnosed with HIV in 1993.
At the time she was told she had -two-to-four years to live. But the Toronto resident defied those odds and has since become a well-known activist both here in Canada and on the international scene. In her talk titled, ‘Are Women Becoming an Endangered Species Due to the AIDS Epidemic,?’ which she delivered during the Women’s Health Matters Forum in January, Ms. Binder focused on the disproportionate impact HIV/AIDS is having on women around the world, including those in Canada.
“The rates are climbing, disproportionately, among women everywhere,” she says. “Most of these women live in Sub-Saharan Africa. These are women in the prime of their lives. They leave behind orphans – millions of them in fact – and deprive communities of food producers, caregivers, teachers and of course, mothers, daughters and sisters.
“Many are very young, just girls really. Their deaths are the loss of an entire generation in some parts of the world,” she says, noting that in Sub-Saharan Africa, the epidemic is driven primarily by heterosexual sex.
“For most of these women, the greatest risk of HIV infection is being married in what they perceive to be a monogamous relationship,” Ms. Binder says, adding that is what she had believed herself.
“My vulnerability was to preserve, at all costs, even at the cost of my own life, the myth that marriage equals monogamy. This, despite clear evidence that the reality is quite the contrary,” she says.
“Marriage and women’s own fidelity are no protection, as studies in a number of countries have shown. Women have no power to negotiate safer sex practices with their partners and married men often have multiple sexual partners with whom they practice unsafe sex,” Ms. Binder says.
The situation in Asia and Eastern Europe is more complex.
There, the epidemic is “fuelled among women by the interplay of injection-drug use and unprotected sex,” she says, adding that the commercial sex trade is also a factor.
In Canada, the number of women being infected with HIV is on the rise, she says.
“In 2003, approximately 26 per cent of new infections were among women. And, shockingly, 42.5 per cent of those cases were young women aged 15 to 29,” she says. “Also, in 2003, 65 per cent of women in Canada who contracted HIV did so due to heterosexual contact. This is an increase of almost 20 per cent in two decades.”
Ms. Binder added that many young people in Canada are ill-informed about the virus and the methods by which it is transmitted.
“Disturbingly, one Canadian study showed that a substantial number of young Canadians believe that there is a vaccine to prevent HIV/AIDS and that the disease can be cured if treated early,” she says. “Where are our public health education and prevention programs? Clearly they are insufficient and ineffective.”
She claims that North American women have been the “silent epidemic” for years.
“No one wanted to listen to the few of us who decided to brave the huge amount of stigma and discrimination that surrounded, and still surrounds this disease, to tell our stories of betrayal and loss publicly.
“It was a cautionary tale of disaster to come that went unheeded. As a result, no prevention programs were targeted to women and just as we harbingers of doom predicted, the numbers of women with this disease rose and the number of infected children born to these women grew,” Ms. Binder says.
“We begged policy makers to read the writing on the blood-stained wall. But no one wanted to hear it. And now, we have the worst situation imaginable: soaring infection rates in a new generation of women in Canada.”
