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Saving
Women’s Lives – A Growing Focus on Women
and HIV/AIDS Recent years have witnessed an acceleration in the number of
HIV/AIDS cases involving women. Where
women once accounted for less than 40 percent of all cases, by the end of 2000,
women as a percentage of all HIV/AIDS infected adults reached 47
percent. Accordingly, there is
increasingly attention to the special gender dimensions of the HIV/AIDS crisis
– which include everything from women’s low social status in many nations to
the importance of basic education and continued research on women-controlled methods
of guarding against sexually transmitted infections like HIV. At the Global
Health Council’s Annual Conference: http://www.globalhealth.org/view_top.php3?id=92 (May 29-June
1), 1500 health and development professionals will focus on “Health Women:
Healthy World – Challenges for the Future.”
According to the Council, “women and their families are
deeply affected by the realities of globalization, by access to health and educational
services driven by macro-economic policies, and by empowerment and rights
issues driven by political forces. The effects of natural disasters, wars and
other forms of violence can have a profound effect. Growing commercial threats
to health, such as tobacco use, call for our attention as women and children
become targets of marketing of deadly products.”
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