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Women still hardest-hit by AIDS - Piot

    JOHANNESBURG

    Women in Africa are still hardest-hit by HIV/AIDS, despite some headway being made in lowering the numbers in parts of the continent, UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot said on Wednesday.

    "I believe that we are having such a big epidemic ... because of the lack of control of women over sexuality," Piot told delegates at a three-day UN High Level Meeting on HIV and AIDS underway in New York.

    Of particular concern was the sexual assault of women and child brides by their husbands, and the hurdles women and young girls still encountered when it came to being diagnosed and treated for HIV/AIDS.

    UNAIDS estimated in its 2006 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic, released earlier this week, that 17 million of the over 38 million HIV-positive people worldwide were women, three-quarters of them living in Africa.

    This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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