High rates of AIDS among young African women will lead to a population imbalance that will take generations to overcome and make the AIDS epidemic even worse, a top UN official said on Tuesday.
Experts called for more prevention efforts to be targeted at young women of child-bearing age to counter the spread of HIV among them. United Nations figures show that women make up 58% of people in sub-Saharan Africa living with HIV/AIDS.
Young women in the region are now up to six times more likely than young men to be infected with HIV, a report by the UN Population Fund indicates. The result would be a hole in the “age pyramid” that had only been seen before in times of war, Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, said.
In wartime, mainly men were affected, but, among the young infected by HIV in Africa, it was mostly women, he told a news conference at the International AIDS Conference.
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