"We are giving great care and services to our cars daily but we have failed to give the same treatment to women living with HIV/AIDS. Women deserve special attention and we must give them services.”
“We are giving great care and services to our cars daily but we have failed to give the same treatment to women living with HIV/AIDS. Women deserve special attention and we must give them services.” These were the opening words of the International HIV/AIDS Alliance’s executive director, Alvaro Bermejo, at the first HIV thematic panel session of Women Deliver 2013, expressing his concern at how women living with HIV/AIDS have been neglected.
Bermejo said that HIV calls for community and family intervention. “We know that HIV has turned into a chronic disease and how, all over the world, care is primarily provided by family and community members rather than by health systems. We need to make sure that we find a way to recognize their contribution in care but also in advocacy and in prevention that the communities organise themselves outside the health facility,” he said.
He said that linking communities more closely with health care will reduce stigma and he urged the public to change their attitude towards people living with HIV. He said the work the community does has had a proven and significant impact on the HIV epidemic when it comes to care, prevention and adherence to treatment.
“It’s about changing our mindset and recognizing that those two elements, both community and formal health systems, are important in HIV outcomes,” he said.
Bermejo said that in women of reproductive age, HIV/AIDS is still the leading cause of death and HIV accounts for one fifth of all maternal deaths. “Globally young women aged 15-24 have HIV infection rates which are twice as high as in young men and yet young women most affected by HIV are unable to access sexual and reproductive health and HIV services.”
He went on to say that it was critical to empower women from the grass roots up to be able to demand better health services in order to improve HIV service delivery and sexual and reproductive health services.
“It is the starting point to health care and good services. We need to build the capacity of communities to influence quality services,” he said.
Jennifer Bushee, Stop AIDS Now’s senior advisor on gender and SRHR added to the discussion saying that: “Young women living with HIV are the engineers of change.”
She said that despite this, they still face huge challenges in health facilities ranging from gender based violence, human rights violations, and verbal and physical abuse.
The Global Network of People Living with HIV (GNP+), Georgina Caswell, said that young women and girls are often prevented from accessing and practicing their sexual and reproductive rights because of community attitude and cultural beliefs.
She said that young girls are forced to marry much older men which exposes them to HIV and vowed to stop the practice.
Caswell disclosed that they are involving paralegal officers, police, and community, cultural, religious and political leaders to team up together and stop older men from marrying underage girls and they are also working to engage parents to stop the habit of marrying off their daughters in order to attain riches and property.
“We want to end this problem,” she said. “It is illegal, it exposes young girls to HIV, gender violence, and stigma and discrimination. We need to protect the young women from getting HIV and ensure that their sexual rights are not abused. This is the reason why we are involving the police and paralegal officers to help us enforce the law.”
She also said that many young women have died while giving birth because their bodies are too young to handle pregnancy and child birth.
“Young marriages and pregnancies have contributed to maternal mortality because the girls are married off at a tender age when their bodies are not ready to carry a child and if we don’t stop this practice now, we will never eliminate maternal deaths.”
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