Forty-Five Percent of New HIV Infections Occur Among Young People in Mozambique

At the introduction of the annual UN Fund for Population Activities report on Wednesday in Maputo, UN representative Petra Lantz announced that 45 percent of new HIV infections occur among Mozambicans age 24 and younger. Women ages 20-24 have four times as many HIV infections as men in the same age group, she said. "That's why more stress must be laid on empowering girls so that they can attend school, obtain life skills, protect themselves against sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS, and avoid early pregnancies," she said. The nation's infant mortality rate has declined from 147 per 1,000 lives births in 1997 to 125 at present; maternal mortality has fallen from an estimate of more than 1,000 deaths per 100,000 live births to 408 deaths per 100,000 live births by 2003. The UNFPA report is titled "The Cairo Consensus at Ten: Population, Reproductive Health and the Global Effort to End Poverty."

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