PANAJI
Much to the surprise of health officials tracking the contours of incidence of HIV/AIDS, the incidence of the deadly sexually transmitted disease (STD) has been dropping drastically among Goan women over the last five years.
Data shows that women constituted 40 per-cent of the total new cases reported in the State in 2019. Last year, this share of women as the percentage of new HIV infections reported in the State dropped to just 29 percent. And a year earlier in 2022, it was even lower at 25 per-cent.
Health officials are at a loss to pinpoint the reasons for such a drastic fall in the rate at which women are falling victim to HIV even as they said that over a longer time period of a decade-and-a-half since 2009, there has been a 11.7 per-cent decline in HIV infections among the State’s female population.
On the other hand, the rate of HIV infection for men in Goa has increased by 10.2 percent since 2009. In fact in these 14 years since 2009, 59.3 percent of the total HIV infections were in men and it was just 40.7 percent for women.
Last year, men constituted a whopping male 69.5 percent of all new HIV infection people reported in the year and just 29 percent were women, according to data obtained from the GSACS (Goa State AIDS Control Society).
In these 14 years since 2019, there was a sudden spike in the rate of infection among women for just one year -- 2015 -- when 45.5 per-cent of all people detected with HIV in that year were women. However, from the next year (2016) until last year, this rate at which HIV infections among women are reported has been drastically dropping annually with 2022 being the year in which the proportion of female victims was the least at 25.6 percent.
In 2020, the same ratio was 37.2 percent and 32.7 percent in 2021. In 2019, a year before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, it was 40.9 percent in 2019.
Another interesting takeaway from the data mined by GSACS officials is that the infection was prevalent the most among women in the 35 to 49 age group, followed by the group of women aged between 25 and 34 years.
Mortality in men higher
GSACs officials said, among those in whom the HIV infection has progressed to full blown AIDS patients, mortality was higher in men.
Of the 140 who died of AIDS in 2009, 91 were men (65 percent) and 49 women (35 percent). Last year (2023, there were 32 deaths reported due to AIDS. This figure included 21 men (65.62 percent) and 11 women (34.37 percent).
