AIDS AMONG AFRICAN WOMEN

AIDS among African Women



AIDS among African Women

Introduction

HIV stands for “human immunodeficiency virus”, the virus that causes AIDS. AIDS stands for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. HIV attacks and disables the immune system, the body's natural line of defense, stripping it of its capacity to repel disease-causing organisms. AIDS is considered fatal, although many people currently live with HIV/AIDS as a result of the development of powerful antiviral medications. For people in industrialized nations like the United Kingdom and Canada, Western European nations, Japan, and the like, HIV/AIDS may become a chronic but controllable state, like diabetes. But for many millions in developing nations, where medications are too expensive or difficult to deliver, HIV/AIDS may remain a death sentence.

While Africa has only 10% of the total population of the world, but around 70% of AIDS victims are present in Africa. In 2008, from 33 million persons having AIDS, 22 were from Africa and half of them are women. Thus, African women are in strong need of protection and it may be performed by dealing with inequalities related to masculinity of femininity. Women require a good allocation of handling.

Discussion

About 39.5 million people around the world are estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS, split nearly evenly between males and females. About three million are children. The probability of transmission is affected by the type of sexual activity. Anal intercourse provides a convenient port of entry for HIV because it abrades the rectal lining, and rectal cells are particularly vulnerable. (Wallace 2008, 65)

[Gender of AIDS victims during 2010]

The prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Africa, where the infection rate in 2007 was nearly seven times that in the United States—4.0 percent versus 0.6 percent—is forcing Africans to take a serious look at the practice of “wife inheritance.” Adherence to this custom has increased the death rate due to HIV/AIDS as men taking over their sisters-in-law whose husbands died of AIDS have themselves become infected and died. (Alexander 2008, 65)

Cultural values are powerful and have come into play when Africans have collectively come under attack. In 1985, during a United Nations Conference on Women held in Nairobi, Kenya, women from outside Africa wanted to talk about polygyny, the African custom that allows men to take more than one wife, which non-African women saw as a mark of oppression of African women. Some of them also had an agenda of their own: a discussion on sexual orientation with hopes of convincing the world community that same sex intimacy was merely an alternative life style, as an alternative lifestyle. The African women, on the other hand, considered same sex intimacy a perversion, rather than an alternative lifestyle, and certainly not a topic worthy of discussion at an international conference. Clearly, there was a clash of cultures. It is true that many African women do not like polygyny. However, they do not see it as an issue that requires the intervention of their sisters worldwide. (Aloo 2007, 25)

A compromise was ...