Some 80 percent of Rwandan women are infected with HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS, the president of the Rwandan Association of Trauma Counselors, Beatrice Karengera, said on Friday.

At the opening of a two-day Kigali conference on the effects of Trauma, she said most of these women were infected after being raped by Rwandan army troops during the 1994 genocide of one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu. "This has brought continuous agony to many families rendering them helpless," she said.

An official of the Ministry of Health, Yvonne Kayitesi, said HIV had dented the country's labour force and increased the army of orphans surviving on the streets.