The Future of HIV Prevention: Prospects for an Effective Anti-HIV Microbicide

As the devastation of the HIV-AIDS epidemic continues, women are in-creasingly bearing the greatest impact, particularly in developing countries [1]. In many of these countries, nearly 60 % of people living with HIV-AIDS are women [2], and in several African countries, women 15 to 24 years of age are more than three times more likely to be infected than men the same age [3]. In South Africa, one in four women is infected by 22 years of age [4]. Globally, more than 17.5 million women are now living with HIV-AIDS [5], and there are an estimated 13.2 million infected women in sub-Saharan Africa [6]. Although effective prevention technologies and strategies do already exist, these are clearly insufficient to address the problems of the epidemic, Infect Dis Clin N Am 21 (2007) 219–239especially in developing countries. The ‘‘ABC’ ’ approach (Abstinence, Be faithful, and use Condoms) has been used with some success in a number of African countries [5,7]. However, in a survey among young women in * Corresponding author