Positive women
By March 1993, 721 women had been reported in Australia as diagnosed with HIV infection. This represented 4% of reported diagnoses in Australia.
Yet more than a decade into the epidemic, women with HIV remain under-studied, under-reported and under-diagnosed. Doctors may not recognise conditions that indicate HIV disease in women.
HIV research barely recognises positive women. Women have been routinely denied access to drug trials, and information about the efficacy and safety of drugs used in HIV treatment is based exclusively on their effects in men. Many have died of HIV-related illnesses without ever being recognised and included in the statistics on deaths from AIDS. Eligibility criteria for economic assistance and services are constricting, and health providers are generally more ignorant about the course of the illness in women.
Lesbians with HIV are often invisible, and lesbian sexual practices are not routinely included in safe sex educational programs. Confusion abounds among lesbians and health care providers because no research base exists about women-to-woman sexual practices and their risks of HIV transmission. Woman-to-woman transmission of HIV was still classified in the "no identified risk" category by the US Centre for Disease Control n 1990.
Positive Women is a support group for HIV-positive women. Formed in NSW and Victoria, it provides support and highlights issues confronting positive women. It raises awareness in the community that women do get HIV/AIDS and that their needs are different from those of men who are HIV positive.
In 1993 the National Centre for HIV Social Research, located at Macquarie University in Sydney, initiated a project which focused on women living with HIV/AIDS, an important step in attempting to redress the imbalance in HIV/AIDS research, which both in Australia and overseas has focused primarily on men.
These are all important initiatives in the face of the epidemic. Redressing the imbalance that exists is crucial in the context of a global epidemic in which women make up a huge number of those affected, particularly in the Third World. Developing community understanding and awareness of these issues here is vital to combating the epidemic everywhere.
By Kath Gelber