How to protect women against both HIV and pregnancy

Ringing the changes

PLENTY of progress has been made in the fight against AIDS. Deaths peaked in 2005, at around 2m people. By 2015 that number had fallen to 1.1m. One big reason is that, of the 36.7m people currently infected with HIV, 18.2m are taking antiretroviral drugs that can hold the virus back for decades. Their number has risen more than twentyfold since the turn of the century.

But not all the statistics are so encouraging. Around 1.9m adults contracted HIV in 2015. That number has hardly budged since 2010. The great bulk of those infections, about 1.3m in 2015, happen in sub-Saharan Africa. They happen more often to women than to men: 58% of HIV-infected people in the region are female. Women between 15 and 24 are infected at almost eight times the rate of men of the same age.

There are several reasons why women contract HIV more often than men. Some are biological: women have a higher chance of contracting HIV from a given act of unprotected sex than men do. But cultural factors matter too, especially in poor countries. As in other aspects of society, it is often men who call the shots in the bedroom. Even if a woman…Continue reading
Source: Economist