UN calls for urgent action to protect young women from HIV/Aids in Africa

UNAids chief says thousands of girls and young women are still being infected with HIV every week

Urgent action is needed to help and protect girls and young women from Aids in sub-Saharan Africa, thousands of whom are still being infected with HIV every week, the UN says.

Many adolescent girls do not know they have the virus and do not seek help or get treatment because they cannot tell their families they have had a sexual relationship with an older man. The death rates among adolescents are high.

In 2015, 7,500 girls and young women aged 15 to 24 were infected with HIV every week. More than 90% of the adolescents infected in sub-Saharan Africa are girls. Between 2010 and 2015, the total annual number of new infections among 15- to 24-year-old women fell just 6%, from 420,000 to 390,000. The UN target to reduce that number to fewer than 100,000 a year by 2020 is way off track, says the latest report from UNAids.

Too little has been done to help girls protect themselves and stay well, according to Michel Sidibé, the executive director of UNAids. “Young women are facing a triple threat,” he said. “They are at high risk of HIV infection, have low rates of HIV testing, and have poor adherence to treatment. The world is failing young women and we urgently need to do more.”

Girls are particularly vulnerable in southern Africa because of their low status in a strongly patriarchal society. “Women’s and girls’ heightened vulnerability to HIV goes far beyond physiology: it is intricately linked to entrenched gender inequalities, harmful gender norms, and structures of patriarchy that limit women and girls from reaching their full potential and leave them vulnerable to HIV,” says the report.

Helping girls avoid HIV is hard because efforts must address the issues of gender imbalance and violence in societies, as well as poverty, which causes some girls to have relationships with men for money, says the report. Education is also important. Studies have shown that girls who stay in school longer are less likely to become infected.

The report says that a cycle of infection is taking place, which must be broken. Girls and young women are infected with HIV by older men. Men tend to acquire HIV later in life, from women who were infected when they were younger.

The good news from the report is that the numbers of people with HIV being put on drug treatment to keep them well has now reached 18.2 million, which is 3 million more than two years ago. UNAids says it is on track to meet the treatment target of 30 million people by 2020.

But preventing infection is proving more difficult. There were 2.1m new infections in 2015 – the same number as in each of the last three years and only slightly down from 2.2m in 2010.