Campaign Against AIDS Targets Women Along US-Mexico Border

A new program, "Women and the HIV Virus," offered through the Binational Committee Against AIDS, offers Hispanic women who live in Imperial County, Calif., and Mexicali, Mexico, access to HIV prevention information and free medical analysis in cooperation with area hospitals and medical centers.

"We want to focus on women from both sides of the border, in the Imperial valley and Mexicali, because many US Hispanics, like those in the Mexico region, register high indices of contracting AIDS," said Dr. Arturo Hernandez, coordinator of the project.

The project intends to help women understand their vulnerability to HIV "even if they have one partner" and to inform them that "there are many preventative public programs that can help reduce those risks," Hernandez explained.

According to the CDC, at the end of 1999 there were 24,800 Hispanic women who tested HIV-positive. In the United States, 15 out of every 100,000 Hispanic women have AIDS. This is seven times higher than statistics for white women. In Mexico, in the state of Baja California, 112 women out of every 100,000 women have the illness.

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