Lewis "frantic" over slow AIDS response for women

A senior UN official says there is an urgent need to tackle the gender discrimination that for too long has 'feminised' HIV/AIDS in Africa. After a recent trip to Lesotho and Swaziland, Stephen Lewis, the UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, said at the weekend that it was "impossible to traverse the continent without an enveloping sense of horror and despair at the carnage amongst women". African women and girls remained the unwilling recipients of rights abuses, including rape and sexual violence, polygamy and access to education, said Lewis, "and in very large part this carnage ... has been allowed to rage because the voice of women is the voice that is still not heard". According to the World Health Organisation, an estimated 30 percent of girls aged 15 to 17 in Lesotho were living with the HI virus, while prevalence stood at just over 53 percent among pregnant women in Swaziland. "Lesotho and Swaziland are but symbols of the greater whole: that we are losing millions of young women in Africa ... If there was a powerful international force for women, we would not be in this galling predicament," Lewis commented. The envoy recommended that women and girls should have an exclusive UN agency to defend them, just as the UN Children's Fund protected the rights of younger populations. He also criticised the effectiveness of UN groups fighting for women's rights, suggesting that their efforts should be combined and then "enhanced a hundredfold".