WWW- Imagine a product that would protect you from HIV, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and a host of other sexually transmitted diseases – and prevent unwanted pregnancy at the same time.

Now, imagine that your bedside helper wasn’t a condom, but a vaginal lubricant you could use, whether or not you wanted your boyfriend or husband to know about it. And that it would keep you safe while enhancing your sex life.

Twenty-eight-year-old Maria only wishes such a thing existed. After giving birth to her daughter at 16, she insisted on condoms. During one encounter, she said, the condom broke. She was 18 when she received the devastating news that she had HIV.

“Guys like to come up with a lot of excuses, especially, ‘Oh, that’s a regular condom, it doesn’t fit me,'” said Maria, a woman from the Bronx who asked to be identified by a pseudonym. She would have jumped at the chance to supply her own form of protection. “Definitely I would have used that,” she said. “It gives you the choice.”

For more than a decade, women’s health activists have been urging scientists to create these safe-sex tools, called microbicides.

They’re closer than ever. Recent infusions of cash from the Gates Foundation and commitment from G8 leaders to buy microbicides once they’re ready have given the concept credibility.

Throughout the nearly 25 years of the AIDS epidemic, sexually active women have had limited means of avoiding HIV. Condoms, and the necessary conversations and cooperation with men they require, have offered their only protection.

Women’s lack of power has been deadly: Unprotected sex with men now accounts for 79% of new female HIV infections. Microbicides could potentially save the lives of 2.5 million people worldwide over a three-year period, according to a report commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation. A gel, cream or capsule that a woman could insert into her vagina before sex, a microbicide would protect her against disease by immobilizing HIV or ratcheting up her natural immune defenses against the virus. And because microbicides would be formulated to mimic a woman’s natural lubricant, proponents say they would feel less intrusive than a condom.

A microbicide could be available within three to four years, according to UNAIDS – sooner than an AIDS vaccine. Fourteen versions are in the works, and five have proven safe and promising enough for scientists to begin testing whether they actually protect women from HIV.

When volunteers in two studies at Bronx-Lebanon and Harlem Hospitals tested potential candidates, “they even liked it,” said Dr. Jessica Justman, an attending physician at the hospitals who is planning a third study for the fall.

“Males get uncomfortable talking about something with the word ‘vagina’ in it,” she said. But of the male partners of women in the trials, “most liked it once they were actually experiencing it.”

When world leaders committed to buying microbicides at the G8 summit this month, observers said the move would encourage pharmaceutical companies to invest in the technology – something few have done (Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline have contributed to the research).

The Gates Foundation has dedicated more than $88.5 million in grants. And just this month the appropriations committee in the U.S. Senate cleared a bill that would bring the total of yearly foreign aid dedicated to microbicides to $42 million.

Still, just 2% of the AIDS budget of the National Institutes of Health – $69 million – is devoted to microbicides research, compared to $607 million for its AIDS vaccine studies. What’s really needed is a special NIH research branch dedicated to microbicides, activists say.

What’s the hold-up? Lori Heise, director of the Global Campaign for Microbicides, suggests women themselves may have to convince government and industry to develop a safe and effective microbicide, using the grassroots tools that were effective in creating breast cancer research and domestic violence awareness campaigns.

“We’re at the frontier of really asking the big hard question about whether or not they work to protect women in real life,” said Heise.

“The situations women face of negotiating safety in terms of forced sex or infection, I just don’t think that men get it,” she said. “Realistically, it’s going to have to be women to force attention to this issue. This will only happen if women make it happen.”

AIDS is the leading killer of African-American women ages 25 to 34, and the sixth-leading cause of death among all U.S. women in that age group.

HIV is spreading fastest among Americans who are 25 and younger, with unprotected sex with men accounting for 79% of new female infections. Between 1999 and 2003, AIDS cases leapt by 15% among American women, compared to 1% for men, according to the June issue of Science.

At the same time, one in four American women has genital herpes; by age 30, half of all U.S. women will have had chlamydia; gonorrhea is also on the rise.