The Focus Is On Men For World AIDS Day 2000
The theme for World AIDS Day 2000 is 'AIDS - Men Make A Difference'. Each year, the world community recognizes the challenge that the AIDS epidemic poses to our development by marking December 1st as World AIDS Day. The BVI Worlds AIDS Day Committee will join in the observation through various activities including radio and television features, newspaper supplements and special awareness sessions with students of the Bregado Flax Educational Centre Secondary division. The Committee comprises officials from the Departments of Health and Education, the BVI Red Cross Association and the Virgin Islands National Youth Council.
This year's theme focuses on the role of men in society and seeks to generate discussion and awareness of ways in which men may be putting themselves and their families in danger of getting AIDS through their own risky sexual behaviour. The theme also suggests that men are in a very powerful position to protect themselves and their families from HIV/AIDS. 'Men Make A Difference' is the title of the first year of a two-year campaign focusing on the role of men in the AIDS epidemic, according to the United Nations programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) 2000. The new campaign aims to involve men more fully in the effort against AIDS and to bring about a much-needed focus on men. In 2000, the campaign has three broad goals. The first is to raise awareness of the relationship between men's behaviour and HIV. The second is to encourage men and adolescent boys to make a strong commitment to preventing the spread of HIV and caring for those affected. And the third goal is to promote programmes that respond to the needs of both men and women.
All over the world, women find themselves at special risk of HIV infection because of their lack of power to determine where, when and how sex takes place. What is less recognized, however, is that the cultural beliefs and expectations that make this the case also heighten men’s own vulnerability. HIV infections and AIDS deaths in men outnumber those in women on every continent except sub-Saharan Africa. Young men are more at risk than older ones: about one in four people with HIV is a young man under the age of 25, according to UNAIDS. At the end of 1999, 34.3 million men, women and children were living with HIV or AIDS and 18.8 million had already died from the disease. In 1999, there were 5.4 million new infections worldwide, of which 4 million were in sub-Saharan Africa and 800,000 in South and South-east Asia. By the end of 1999, 10 million African men were living with HIV, as compared with 7.5 million infected men in the rest of the world combined. According to UNAIDS, the time is ripe to start seeing men, not as some kind of problem, but as part of the solution.