Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-01-Speech-3-146"
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"en.20041201.14.3-146"2
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"Mr President, today, the European Parliament is observing International AIDS Day. It is important for us to give those affected our full support and for us to take extremely seriously our share of responsibility for public health.
For the first time since HIV/AIDS was discovered, more women than men are now infected. In certain areas, young women are up to two and a half times more vulnerable to infection than young men of the same age. In certain countries, nearly 60% of the people infected are women. Many women and girls are especially vulnerable to infection because of other people’s – that is to say, men’s – behaviour in terms of risk and because of the discrimination widely practised in the world between men and women when it comes to views of sexuality and sexual rights.
The consequences of the HIV/AIDS epidemic are far greater for women and children than for men and boys. This year, the UN body, UNAIDS has therefore selected its theme, ‘Women, Girls, HIV and AIDS’. When relatives become sick or die, it is mainly women and girls who have to take care of their own families. When the health care systems are over-stretched or when they collapse as a result of HIV/AIDS, it is women and girls who have to compensate for the fact by providing increased care and attention in the home. Nor are women given the same access as men to health care and to medicines that retard the progress of the disease. Old, traditional views, such as the view that men have a right to sex, also mean that many married women cannot protect themselves against infection introduced by their husbands after they have been unfaithful.
It is therefore outrageous that, in today’s edition of the newspaper
the Vatican calls AIDS a moral disease of the immune system. I think that laying the blame on those who are ill is both inhumane and unchristian. Gender equality, together with sexual and reproductive health and rights, need to be common objectives for every country in the world and, above all, a responsibility for all men. Women must be strengthened in their negotiating position when it comes to condom use and, without exception, given increased rights and better conditions of life.
We are all losers now, but tests are now beginning in Sweden on a new medicine to combat HIV. If this works, it will create a sensation throughout the world. A preventive vaccine is no doubt what we all dream of, so let us hope for a positive result."@en1
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