Teenage girls, especially those in Sub-Saharan Africa, are experiencing the worst of the global AIDS crisis, the UN says
Teenage girls are bearing the brunt of the global HIV burden, according to a new UNICEF report.
The report, published earlier this month, found that girls between ages 10 and 19 were twice as likely to contract the disease than boys within the same age group.
In total, 98,000 adolescent girls were infected with the virus in 2022, down nearly 100,000 from the total in 2010. For comparison, just over 40,000 boys in the age group were infected last year. More than half of these infections were recorded in eastern and southern Africa.
While this highlights progress for stopping the disease globally, leaders warn that girls are being left behind.
Many STDs are more likely to be transmitted to the partner receiving penetrative sex than the one penetrating. In some cases it's as extreme as a 10:1 chance.
So while it could relate to aspects of partner selection, given what I've seen before in terms of HIV transmission rates it's probably the opposite, with young girls being less sexually active with positive partners (or in general) than young men as if they were equally active we should have expected more than a 2x increased infection rate of young girls.
Biologically it's not a 1:1 risk rate for transmission, which is an important confounding factor to consider in interpreting this result.
Edit: Actually looking at the current numbers this seems like it's equally active young men and women with almost exactly what should be expected in vaginal sex transmission rates:
A meta-analysis of 10 studies exploring the risk of transmission through vaginal sex was published in 2009.4 It is estimated the risk of HIV transmission through receptive vaginal sex (receiving the penis in the vagina) to be 0.08% (equivalent to 1 transmission per 1,250 exposures).
A meta-analysis of three studies exploring the risk from insertive vaginal sex (inserting the penis into the vagina) was estimated to be 0.04% (equivalent to 1 transmission per 2,500 exposures).4