Aids epidimic threatens health targets - UN chief

The global HIV/Aids epidemic is threatening efforts to achieve sexual and reproductive health goals that are supposed to improve the lives of women and reduce poverty, a UN chief said today.

The fight against Aids has exhausted health services in many poor countries, compounding high rates of death in childbirth, and other risks associated with complications during pregnancy, said Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the UN Population Fund.

Women now account for almost half the 40 million people infected worldwide - 30 million of whom live in Africa.

African women also have a one-in-16 chance of dying in childbirth, compared with one-in-2,800 in the West. A half-million women die every year during pregnancy or childbirth, mostly in poor countries. Around 18 million are left ill or disabled after giving birth.

Governments in poor nations cannot afford to train midwives or obstetric specialists, Obaid said in Geneva as she launched a 120 page study by her agency.

The report focuses on the slow progress made since 1994, when governments at a conference in Cairo adopted an ambitious 20 year program to slow the growth of the world’s population – then nudging six billion, now around 6.3 billion – in the hope that the move would help cut poverty and make it easier for countries to provide education and other services.

The basic planks of the programme included providing reproductive health care and family planning, and promoting sexual equality. It also set goals to reduce death rates for infants and children. The aim was to help women raise smaller, healthier families in a world where population is forecast to reach 10 billion by 2050.

“Some 120 million women worldwide are still without access to contraception and family planning,” Obaid said.

“We need to make reproductive care accessible to the poor,” she said, adding that the UN Population Fund also is careful to “take the social and cultural environment into account.”

Since the Cairo summit, the agency has steered global efforts, helping countries develop policies on gender equality and family planning.