Aids becoming 'a teenage disease'

Press Association
Wednesday October 8, 2003
The Guardian

Aids has become a disease of teenagers and young adults, with half of all new infections occurring in 15 to 24-year-olds, according to a United Nations report released today.

Around the world, an estimated 6,000 young people every day - or one every 14 seconds - become infected with the disease, and the majority of them are young women, the study revealed.

The fastest spread of Aids was in sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated 8.6 million young people are infected, followed by South Asia, where 1.1 million are infected, the report by the UN's Population Fund (UNFPA) said.

The State of the World population report, which has been published annually since 1978, was presented by the executive director of the fund, Thoraya Obaid, at an international press conference in central London.

This year's report, Making One Billion Count: Investing in Adolescents' Health and Rights, focused on the risks and challenges faced by the world's 1.2 billion adolescents, the largest generation of adolescents in history.

Poverty is a major factor in HIV infection, the report said, with some girls in the world's poorest countries exchanging sex for money towards school fees or to help their families.

The report also found that married adolescent girls were at particular risk since they were often married to older men with more sexual experience and were generally unable to negotiate condom use.

Providing accurate, age-appropriate sex education and encouraging safe and responsible behaviour were essential to the prevention of teenage pregnancy and stopping the spread of Aids, the report said.

Yet 44 out of 107 countries surveyed did not include Aids education in their school curricula, and young people were increasingly receiving their knowledge from unreliable sources, such as their peers and the media, it noted.

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