Are you aware that a woman tests positive for HIV every 35 minutes in the United States?
Are you aware that one in four Americans living with HIV is a woman?
Are you aware that HIV/AIDS is a growing problem for women and girls in our region, particularly African-American women and girls? The District of Columbia and Maryland had the highest and second-highest women’s AIDS case rates in the country in 2007 (90.2 cases per 100,000 population for DC and 22.2 cases per 100,000 population for Maryland) (http://www.statehealthfacts.org/)? For more on the specifics in D.C., you can read a previous blog of mine by clicking here.
Maybe you can you guess from my questions that today is National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day.
I hope that increased awareness leads us to recognize that we must act – for ourselves and for others – because lives are literally on the line. I hope we can act together to improve:
- Prevention strategies that address the dominant ways women acquire HIV: sex with men who are infected and injection drug use (much more of an issue for women than for men).
- The availability of routine HIV testing in places women already go for health and other services for themselves and their children. (By the way: Do you know your HIV status?)
- Attention to treatment, including to AIDS drugs but also for the many health conditions that occur with HIV, such as alcohol and drug abuse and mental illness.
- Women’s empowerment. In D.C. this has started with a new effort — the first in the nation — to make the newly re-designed female condom widely available for free (thanks to the hard work of the Washington AIDS Partnership and support from the MAC AIDS Fund — and The Women’s Foundation’s own Julie Leibee).
- Support for organizations that help individual women with HIV in our community, including The Women’s Collective and Our Place, DC (both Grantee Partners of The Women’s Foundation), as well as organizations that bring this issue and solutions to it to the attention of policy makers and the public, such as DC Appleseed (another Grantee Partner).
Wishing you act-ful awareness on March 10th – and every other day.
Gwen is a Program Officer at Washington Area Women’s Foundation.
