WOMEN AND HIV/AIDS
I worked part-time in an AIDS clinic for four years, so when I started to write this section on AIDS I thought, ‘That will be easy’. I was wrong. When I sat down, surrounded by references and with my head full of information and experiences, I didn’t know where to start, or what to include and what to leave out. So I asked one of my (adult) daughters what she would want to read about women and AIDS in the 1990s. Without hesitation she answered ‘What I and all my friends want to know is what’s happening. How bad is the epidemic? How many women are infected, how did they get infected and how can we prevent ourselves from ever getting infected?’. I’ll try to answer these questions, hoping that it’s also what you want to know.
The public has been provided with more information and education about HIV/AIDS and its prevention than about any other infection, so I won’t go into a lot of detail about it. Information leaflets about all aspects of HIV infection and AIDS are available free of charge at every hospital, doctor’s surgery and health clinic.
I’m sure that you all know that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is transferred from one person to another through body fluids. Once inside the body, HIV invades and multiplies within lymphocytes and eventually destroys them. Lymphocytes are cells that are an essential part of our immune systems. When many lymphocytes are destroyed by HIV, we can no longer fight off infections and some other diseases, resulting in the illness known as AIDS (short for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome).
The HIV/AIDS epidemic
We have known about HIV/AIDS since 1981.
HIV is responsible for a worldwide epidemic that already has claimed many thousands of lives, and that is growing. So far there is no cure for the disease and no vaccine to prevent infection. The AIDS epidemic is very bad news.
AIDS is the most baffling infectious disease of our times. Though present-day research into this disease is more intense than for any other human illness, experts are still grappling with its mysteries and there is still some uncertainty and disagreement about how the epidemic started and why the infection behaves differently in certain groups of people.
One of the many extraordinary features of the HIV virus is that there can be a very long incubation period between infection and development of illness. A person may become infected and remain well for years – possibly up to 20 years. Whether all those infected will eventually develop AIDS is at present unknown.
It is believed that millions of people have been infected with HIV. If this is right, most don’t know that they’ve been infected and are the greatest worry in the spread of the infection and growth of the epidemic. Even when there are no symptoms the virus can be passed on.
Though the biggest ever public-health education campaign has been aimed at stopping the epidemic, there are still many misunderstandings about the infection and how it spreads. One of the barriers to acceptance of the realities of AIDS is that because so far it has been most often transmitted by gay sex or intravenous drug use, many people think ‘it can’t happen to us: it only affects other people who do things we don’t do (and don’t approve of)’.
The education campaign is beginning to break down this barrier. We now know that it is a myth that AIDS is a disease of homosexual and bisexual men who practice anal intercourse, even though in some countries, including Australia, it first appeared in this group. In some parts of Central Africa almost half of the young women and men are infected with HIV. In parts of Southeast Asia the same situation is rapidly developing. The World Health Organisation stresses that transmission through heterosexual intercourse is now the major risk worldwide.
How many Australian women are HIV-infected?
The total number of women carrying HIV is unknown. Of all Australians known to be infected with HIV, less than 1 in 25 are female. Of the cases of AIDS (not just HIV infection) reported so far in Australia, less than 1 in 33 have been female. Of those women infected for whom heterosexual transmission is likely, about nine out of ten had sexual partners known to be infected or at high risk of infection.
In Australia there is now virtually no risk of transmission from blood transfusion. The infection seems set to spread more rapidly now among intravenous drug users. At present, because it is uncommon among heterosexuals, the risk of heterosexual infection seems to be low in Australia, but authorities warn that this is no reason for complacency and that safe sexual hygiene should be practiced by all.
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