The Guardian today reports: Cash payments help cut HIV infection rate in young women, study finds: Research in Malawi finds girls who receive regular payments are able to resist attentions of older men and avoid infection.”
The headline pretty much says it all … or does it?
The study on which The Guardian report is based on a study that appeared in today’s Lancet: “Effect of a cash transfer programme for schooling on prevalence of HIV and herpes simplex type 2 in Malawi: a cluster randomised trial.” It’s accompanied with an editorial, “Paying to prevent HIV infection in young women?”
The Malawi study was led by Dr. Sarah J Baird, Assistant Professor of Global Health and of Economics at The George Washington University. The interpretation of the findings, as reported in The Lancet, is, for those of us lay folk, the heart of the matter: “Cash transfer programmes can reduce HIV and HSV-2 infections in adolescent schoolgirls in low-income settings. Structural interventions that do not directly target sexual behaviour change can be important components of HIV prevention strategies.”
Pay to prevent HIV infection in young women? You betcha. In effect, when it comes to women’s health, it’s the economy, stupid. In some senses, the larger lesson is that women’s health and well being is always part of the whole life of each woman and girl as well as of women and girls, more generally. HIV transmission is not `simply’ a consequence of sexual behavior, whatever that is. It emerges from the whole life.
Dan Moshenberg
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