International Women's Day 2026: Strengthening Women’s Health through Infectious Disease Prevention and Care

This Research Topic will bring together research that examines how infectious diseases affect women’s health across the life course and how prevention, timely diagnosis, and high-quality care can improve outcomes. We welcome submissions on sex- and gender-related differences in susceptibility, clinical presentation, immune responses, and treatment effectiveness, as well as research addressing the roles of social determinants, stigma, and barriers to access.This collection will focus on infectious disease prevention and management in contexts central to women’s health, including sexual and reproductive health (e.g., HIV, HPV, other STIs), pregnancy and postpartum care, maternal and neonatal infections, vaccine and screening programs, diagnostics and point-of-care approaches, antimicrobial resistance and stewardship, and co-infections or interactions with chronic conditions. We also encourage implementation research, community-based interventions, and policy analyses that strengthen health systems and support equitable care.Infectious diseases affect women through intertwined biological and social pathways that remain insufficiently studied. Sex-based immune differences can alter susceptibility, clinical presentation, treatment response, and long-term sequelae in women, while pregnancy, postpartum physiology, and menopause introduce additional risks and diagnostic complexity. Concurrently, gendered roles in caregiving, frontline health work, and domestic labour increase exposure to infectious and drug-resistant pathogens and can delay care-seeking. Yet infectious disease research still underreports sex- and gender-disaggregated outcomes and routinely under-includes pregnant, postpartum, older, and gender-diverse populations in trials and cohort studies, limiting the evidence base for vaccines, therapeutics, and AMU/AMR stewardship strategies. Structural inequities, especially in low-resource and humanitarian settings, further constrain women access to diagnostics, prevention, and effective treatment. Compounding these gaps, women remain underrepresented in infectious disease leadership and research roles. Together, these biological, systemic, and institutional gaps create a critical need for gender-responsive infectious disease research and policy reform.Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:1) Sex, Immunity, and the Lifecourse• How biological sex and reproductive stage (adolescence, pregnancy, postpartum, menopause, older age) shape infectious disease risk, clinical presentation, treatment response, and vaccine outcomes.• Generation and use of sex‑ and gender‑disaggregated data, including hormonal and reproductive stage variables, and research on long‑term sequelae (e.g., long COVID, chronic infections) for women’s physical and mental health.2) Gender, Systems, and Structural Inequities• How gender roles, norms, and power relations influence exposure (caregiving, informal work, frontline health labour), care‑seeking, antimicrobial use, and adherence.• Structural and intersectional barriers to diagnosis, prevention, and treatment (stigma, GBV, financial dependence, legal status, conflict and displacement) and design/evaluation of gender‑responsive or gender‑transformative services and surveillance.3) Women as Leaders and the Infectious Disease Workforce• Women’s roles, risks, and protections as clinicians, community health workers, and caregivers, including occupational exposure, PPE access, and psychosocial burden.• Strategies to advance women’s leadership, mentorship, and agenda‑setting in infectious disease research, policy, and financing, including decolonial, community‑engaged and youth‑led approaches. Topic editors: Patricia Sadate-Ngatchou, Fabio Augusto Milner, Baz Semo Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/78833/international-womens-day-2026-strengthening-womens-health-through-infectious-disease-prevention-and-care