AIDS in Europe and Black Immigrant Women

AIDS-EUROPE: Immigrant Women Face Growing Threat
By Julio Godoy

PARIS, Nov 30 (IPS) – Immigrant women are becoming some of the main victims of new HIV transmissions in several European countries, especially in France, according to official figures.

The French Institute for Health Surveillance (InVS, after its French name) said in a report published this week that 6,700 people were diagnosed with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) in France last year. This included a substantial number of women from sub-Saharan countries.

HIV is a retrovirus that causes the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

According to the report by InVS, 57 percent of the new HIV cases are women, and among those, 48 percent are immigrants from sub-Saharan countries.

The paper says that among men, roughly 20 percent of HIV infections reported in 2005 affected sub-Saharan African immigrants. “But the number of HIV infections among sub-Saharan African women reported in 2005 represents roughly double of the cases detected among sub-Saharan African men in the same period.”

A third of all new HIV infections detected in France in 2005 affect an immigrant from sub-Saharan Africa.

The Berlin-based Robert-Koch-Institute (RKI) for health research and surveillance of contagious diseases says in another report that “most of the new cases (of new HIV infections) in Western Europe were caused by heterosexual transmissions among immigrants from sub-Saharan African countries.”

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