Just in 2008, HIV/AIDS has continued to go from a population-specific disease, to one that affects "innocent" women. In other words, we know that sex workers are incredibly vulnerable, especially those in the developing world, but now its "just" women. Malaysia is a perfect example; in an area that is dominated by Islam, and where virginity before marriage and a general "ignorance" about sex is much valued in women, husbands and increasingly fiance's, are contracting the disease and bringing it home to their women. New and improved testing means that testing the general health of these women at routine medical exams is bringing out the fact that more and more monogomous women are suffering from the disease. Of all new cases in Malaysia, over 16% are women, which means at least 2 new cases a day.
Despite the private and public attempts to achieve greater equality between the sexes, there are inherent differences in this culture that make women more vulnerable to abuse and discrimination. Lack of physical strength, for instance, makes women more susceptible to rape and other forms of violence.
Studies have estimated that women between 25 and 49 years have slightly higher levels of vulnerability to HIV infection compared to men. However, between the ages of 20 and 24, they become three times more vulnerable.
According to the Malaysian Ministry of Health and Unicef report titled Women and Girls: Confronting HIV and AIDS in Malaysia, vulnerability to HIV infection among women and girls is often linked and determined by factors which affect and commonly prevent women from actively making choices and decisions about their lives. This is especially true of housewives who now out number sex workers with the disease 5 to 1. Sadly, many women who have it are never diagnosed, and many of the programs that once targeted sex workers do not reach out to wives and mothers, both because of their circumstances and because of cultural taboos that mean the women themselves are blamed, not their husbands.
Malaysia, of course, is not alone in this growing problem of innocent wives being infected; India was perhaps the first country to see this happen, when truckdriving husbands were going from one end of the country to the other, visiting street-side prostitutes as they went, and spreading HIV at an incredibly rapid pace.
Either way, it would seem that the disease the press called the "gay bug," in the 1980s, is now well and truly the "heterosexual plague" of the 2000s.
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