Empowerment of women a must

DIRECTOR OF Education and Training Oakland, California (USA) Shalini Eddens said the US women experience the same emotions of fear, anger and shame as the women in India or other parts of the world, after they test positive for HIV.

DIRECTOR OF Education and Training Oakland, California (USA) Shalini Eddens said the US women experience the same emotions of fear, anger and shame as the women in India or other parts of the world, after they test positive for HIV.

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"After my eight years of experience of working with HIV positive people around the world, I found that most of the HIV positive women lacked proper education and were financially dependent. They had poor access to health care facilities, due to which they developed 'opportunistic' infections like tuberculosis," she added.

In a special interview to HT Allahabad Live, Eddens said that in addition to social stigma, the violence against HIV positive women has also increased during the past few years. "Due to all these factors, the empowerment of women is very important. At times, the woman is the only care giver of her family. She takes care of health and other issues of her family members. But when she is diagnosed as HIV positive, she has to undergo a lot of emotional trauma," she said.

Eddens said an important issue that their organisation tackled was to make family members understand the HIV positive status of a woman. "The organisation's other objective is to stop discrimination and help HIV positive women lead a healthy and independent life," she said and added, "we are also planning HIV projects in India for the mass awareness of women in rural areas."