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China Focus: China Calls for Empowering Women to Fight Rising Ratio of HIV-Infected Females

Posted on: Tuesday, 12 July 2005, 09:01 CDT

China focus: China calls for empowering women to fight rising ratio of HIV-infected females by Fan Xi BEIJING, July 11 (Xinhua) -- China has called for empowering women to ensure that they have equal access to HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment information and services, as the number of female infections has kept on rising at an alarming pace.

According to latest statistics from the Ministry of Health, the proportion of females HIV infected to the total in China has risen from 19.4 percent in 2000 to 28.1 percent by March 2005, nearly a 10 percent jump in less than five years.

"The international consensus is to emphasize women's equal rights and help them really participate in solving urgent issues like curbing the spread of HIV," said Gu Xiulian, chairman of the All- China Women's Federation, at Monday's teleconference on "empowering women and fighting HIV/AIDS," marking the 16th World Population Day, whose theme is "Equality Empowers".

But the women's affairs leader says social and family status inequality, instead of physiological factors, have put women in a disadvantaged position.

In China, illegal blood sales and sexual transmission are the two major ways women get infected with the epidemic. In the rural areas of central China's Henan Province, most HIV-infections are among women, who generally contract the disease after selling blood on the black market to support their families. They are afraid that men, the "bread winners", will be hurt by selling blood.

Xu Shuqin, head of the family planning service station in Henan's Shangcai County, has witnessed several women in the county abandoned by their husbands after contracting HIV through blood sales or being forced to have a sexual life with HIV-infected husbands who refuse to wear condoms. "We have to make more women and girls know they should have equal rights as men and that they have the power to say no to sex if males refuse to wear condoms," she said.

Dr. Christian Voumard, chairman of the United Nations Theme Group on HIV/AIDS and representative of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), said one way to address this problem is to bring China's family planning and AIDS programs closer together and use family planning and reproductive health networks to expand confidential testing and counseling and other AIDS services and information.

"Because AIDS --like family planning -- touches almost all parts of people's lives, learning from the experiences in family planning in China to fight AIDS is important."

The UN agencies such as UNICEF and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and China's National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC) have used the NPFPC's family planning service network around the country to hand out HIV-AIDS prevention and control material and free condoms as well as having offered sexual and reproductive health counseling to farmers, mainly women 15 to 49 years old.

Currently, the UNFPA and NAFPC are carrying out HIV/AIDS prevention programs in eight provinces or autonomous regions in China, such as Yunnan, Guangxi and Sichuan.

Dr. Christian Voumard stressed that eliminating the shame, stigma and discrimination surrounding AIDS is as important as offering medical treatment in fighting HIV/AIDS.

"To prevent new HIV infections and to provide treatment and care to people living with HIV, more people need to be tested, and for people to come forward and be tested they must not be afraid of being stigmatized or discriminated against," he said.

Source: Xinhua News Agency - CEIS

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