CRS, health official warn AIDS affecting more women, girls

Published: 2004-12-07

BALTIMORE (CNS) -- The worldwide scourge of HIV/AIDS increasingly victimizes women and girls in countries where they are treated as second-class citizens, and even in Baltimore the number of infected women is rising at a rate that far outstrips the national average, warned a city health official Dec. 2. "It's not because they're IV (intravenous) drug users or commercial sex workers; they are women who are having heterosexual sex and didn't know they had any risk factors, or women who didn't know their partner was doing things he shouldn't have been doing that allowed HIV to come home," said Dr. Pierre Vigilance, Baltimore's deputy health commissioner for disease prevention. Vigilance joined Ken Hackett, president of Catholic Relief Services, at a CRS event held in conjunction with World AIDS Day, observed Dec. 1. Sponsored by The Catholic Review, newspaper of the Baltimore Archdiocese, the event focused on the challenges presented by HIV/AIDS as the disease affects women and girls throughout the world. Addressing nearly 100 guests, most representing Catholic institutions, Hackett described the extent to which women are biologically, economically and socially more vulnerable to HIV infection than are men. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.

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