Africa

The Best Way to Protect Women from AIDS.  [Nigeria } The world knows that Africans bear the brunt of the AIDS pandemic and that nearly two-thirds of the people infected with HIV live here.  The disease is devastating households and crippling economies across the continent.   But although girls and women are far more vulnerable to infection than men, we have yet to summon the political will to empower and protect them.   Across sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean , epidemics are already feminized.  For example, nearly 58 percent of Nigerians with HIV are female.  What's more, in virtually every region of the world, infections among girls and women are rising sharply.  Unless we urgently address this trend, we will fail to end this scourge.   Recognizing the reality in their own countries, some national governments, including Nigeria 's, have taken important steps to prevent infection in girls and women.
For African Women, Obstetric Nightmare. [Nigeria ] Mostly teenagers who tried to deliver their first child at home, the mothers-to-be failed at labor.  Their babies were lodged in their narrow birth canals, and the resulting pressure cut off blood to vital tissues and ripped holes in their bowels or urethras, or both.  Now their babies are dead.  And the would-be mothers, their insides wrecked, are utterly incontinent.  Many have become outcasts in their own communities - rejected by their husbands, shunned by neighbors, too ashamed even to step out of their huts.  Until this decade, outside countries that might be able to help effectively ignored the problem.  The last global study, in which the World Health Organization estimated that more than two million women were living with obstetric fistulas, was conducted 16 years ago.  Nor has a recent spate of international attention brought an outpouring of aid.  Two years of global fund-raising by the UN Population Fund, an agency devoted in part to improving women's health, has netted only $11 million for the problem.
Topless Virgins Vie for King in AIDS-hit Swaziland.  [ Swaziland ] More than 50,000 bare-breasted virgins vied to become the King of Swaziland's 13th wife on Monday in a ceremony which critics say ill befits a country with the world's highest HIV/AIDS rate.  King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa 's last absolute monarch, arrived dressed in a leopard-skin loincloth to watch the Reed Dance ceremony, which he has used since 1999 to pluck new brides from the girls dressed in little more than beaded mini-skirts.   Wielding machetes and singing tributes to the king and queen mother, also known as the Great She-Elephant, the girls danced around the royal stadium in the hope of catching the eye of the 37-year-old monarch.  Many maidens, who come from villages across the country, dream of joining the king's wives who each have their own palace and BMW car.  But others were scared catching the royal eye could curtail their freedom and force them into a polygamous marriage.

Back