NEW YORK: The United Nations launched a global campaign yesterday to prevent girls and women from contracting HIV, now the leading cause of death and disease among women worldwide between the reproductive ages of 15 and 49.

The UN Aids agency and singer and Aids activist Annie Lennox unveiled a five-year plan to review a 1994 platform to achieve equality for women. The platform was adopted by 189 countries at the historic Beijing conference and inclu-ded a call for action to prevent HIV in women and treat them.

The UN Millennium Development goals, adopted in 2000, include halting and reversing the Aids pandemic by 2015.

But Michel Sidibe, the executive director of UNAids, said the proportion of women infected with HIV had risen in many parts of the world over the past 10 years.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 60 percent of people living with HIV were women, and in southern Africa the prevalence of HIV among women aged 15-24 was on average about three times higher than young men of the same age, UNAids said.

Sidibe said growing inequality between women and men and human rights violations against women, including rapes and trafficking for prostitution, were putting women and girls at greater risk of HIV infections.

He said 400 000 babies were born every year with HIV in Africa and 30 percent would die before their first birthday without medicine, but it also meant 400 000 women had not been checked for HIV and had no treatment "to avoid the transmission from mother to child".

The Agenda for Action launched yesterday calls for the UN, governments and voluntary organisations to work together to combat violence against women, analyse and address the factors that prevent women and girls from protecting themselves against HIV, and scale up engagement with men's and boys' organisations.

Sidibe said the plan would work because it was not developed just by the UN but by governments and volunteer groups and had a timeline with targets.

For the first time, he said, countries would be reporting back and there would be "a scorecard which can really show what type of progress has been made".