HEALTH-BRAZIL:
AIDS Spreading Six Times Faster Among Teenage Girls

Mario Osava


RIO DE JANEIRO,  (IPS) - HIV/AIDS is spreading at an alarming rate among teenage girls in Brazil, with six 13 to 19-year-old girls infected for every boy in that age group.

That is the only category in which the growth of the epidemic shows such ''a huge gender difference,'' with the rate dropping among teenage boys and rising swiftly among girls, Alexandre Granjeiro, the head of the Brazilian Health Ministry's division on Sexually Transmitted Diseases and AIDS (ETS/Sida), said in an interview with IPS.

Nevertheless, women still represent a minority of the people living with HIV/AIDS in this Latin American country of nearly 180 million.

They account for only 35 percent of the 138,000 patients currently receiving treatment with antiretroviral drugs -- which are provided free of charge by the public health system -- and just 28 percent of the total 277,153 cases registered in Brazil since 1983.

A number of factors have come together to fuel the spread of HIV/AIDS among adolescents in recent years.

''Besides having less bargaining power to convince their partners to use condoms, girls tend to stop insisting on condom use once the relationship evolves into a more stable one based on ties of affection,'' when they begin to use other contraceptive methods, putting a higher priority on preventing pregnancy, said Granjeiro.

To that is added the fact that adolescent girls often get involved with older men, who have a higher rate of HIV/AIDS and ''are less willing to use condoms,'' he said.

The growing incidence of HIV/AIDS among female adolescents is also directly related to the increasingly young age at which teenagers are becoming sexually active.

On average, the start of sexual activity occurs between the ages of 13.9 and 14.5 years among boys, and between the ages of 15.2 and 16 years among girls in Brazil, according to a study by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), based on a survey carried out among 16,422 students aged 10 to 24 in Brasilia and 13 state capitals.

For that reason, the Health Ministry launched a controversial condom distribution programme in schools in five municipalities last year. ''It was a pilot phase, to test the methodology, see how much resistance we ran into, and determine the best way to distribute them,'' said Granjeiro.

There were problems in schools where the distribution was carried out ''in a more bureaucratic manner,'' and success in schools where ''students played a key role or actively participated'' in the initiative, he said.

This year, the programme will be extended to 205 municipalities, which account for nearly half of all HIV/AIDS cases in Brazil.

Nearly 2.2 million condoms will be handed out in 900 public schools, attended by a total of 540,000 students, said the head of ETS/Sida.

The measure is seen as one of the only effective ways to curb the spread of the epidemic among children and adolescents, since nearly all of them go to school, where they spend half of their day, and ''which is the place where they prefer to talk about sex,'' he said.

Granjeiro added that the distribution of condoms must complement sex education, which should begin in the earliest grades of primary school.

Besides the spread of HIV/AIDS, teen pregnancy is also on the rise, according to the UNESCO study. The proportion of the female respondents who said they had been pregnant at least once ranged from 12 to 36.9 percent depending on the city.

But of the 10 to 14-year-old girls surveyed in Fortaleza, the capital of the state of Ceará, in Brazil's impoverished northeast, a full one-third said they had been pregnant.

A large majority of the students surveyed said they had sex with only one partner and put a high value on faithfulness, while they demonstrated an awareness of the need to protect themselves from HIV/AIDS.

But nearly half of the respondents in several state capitals admitted that they did not regularly use condoms.

HIV/AIDS prevention among women, especially adolescents, is also a concern shared by the United Nations joint Programme Against HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), which decided to focus its campaign this year on girls and women.

''Women, Girls, HIV and AIDS'' is the theme of the international campaign that will wrap up on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day.

At a global level, the HIV infection rate is growing fast among the young: 67 percent of new cases in developing countries involve people between the ages of 15 and 24, and 64 percent of the people in that age group living with HIV/AIDS are women, reports the U.N. agency.