Conflict fuelling spread of HIV/AIDS

Conflict is a root cause of the spread of HIV/AIDS, and it is promoting up the transmission of the virus, says the international aid agency, Save the Children.

A report, entitled "HIV and Conflict: A Double Emergency", issued at the international AIDS conference being held in Barcelona, Spain, said conflict situations were fuelling the rapid spread of HIV as a result of the exploitation of women forced to resort to sexual bartering due to food scarcity; people being forced from their homes; low levels of HIV awareness; an absence of sexual and reproductive health services; and an increased likelihood of use of unscreened blood.

"Agencies responsible for the provision of food and livelihood security, including the United Nations World Food Programme [WFP], must take steps to ensure that people have enough food to reduce the risk of young girls and women being forced into trading sex to survive. "Lack of targeted funding from donor countries means there is little or no access to HIV prevention and treatment services in many conflict-affected countries," Save the Children reported.

Young people were most at risk, with children becoming particularly vulnerable when forced from their homes, it said. Children were affected not only by contracting the virus but also by having to head families after the death of one or more parents.

"Unless HIV in conflict situations is addressed, we are likely to see HIV clustering zones in sub-Saharan Africa in the medium term, fuelling infection in nearby peaceful areas," it said.

The agency referred to the case of Rwanda, where thousands of women were raped during the 1994 genocide, leaving an estimated 15,000 girls pregnant. Of 2,000 women tested for HIV afterwards, 80 percent were HIV-positive.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), some 680,000 children had lost parents to AIDS, Save the Children said, and in Burundi up to 13 percent of women and 8 percent of men were believed to be living with the virus.

In the Republic of Congo, the "cycle of armed conflict", which began in the early 1990s and continued to the present day, had increased the prevalence of HIV/AIDS with a "torrent of rapes committed", said an indigenous advocacy organisation, l'Association Panafricaine Thomas Sankara.

Of 4,890 women surveyed in the capital, Brazzaville, 1,745 had been raped during and after the war of December 1998, the association reported. The ROC military constitutes the group with the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS, with at least half of the beds at the Pierre Mobengo Military Hospital being occupied by soldiers with the virus.

[This item is delivered to the "PlusNews" HIV/AIDS Service of the UN's IRIN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.]