Hi Nino, I found your post really interesting and extremely resonant with what I’ve learnt about the effect of stigma and what I’ve heard from my experiences talking to patients on the wards in the hospitals around London. Something that I found from talking to many HIV positive patients who have moved here from around the world is a universal sense that suffering from the disease here is much easier than coping with it from their countries of origin. They are able to find employment here more easily (if they would at all back home), and although it is impossible to say they suffer no stigma whatsoever, it’s definitely fair to say they suffer less here than in other places they have lived.
This got me thinking about the reasons for this, the burden of disease of HIV in the UK is much less than in other countries so although we’re not confronted with it regularly, it seems from stories I’ve heard and general patient experience that people in the UK are on the whole more ready to accept someone with HIV as a member of the community. In my opinion and reflecting what you’ve said above, it definitely boils down to education and public health promotion of what the disease is and its routes of transmission. I personally was prompted to begin thinking about HIV when I was still in primary school, a HIV positive man came in to talk about his experiences dealing with the disease and we were encouraged to ask questions. So in my opinion education from an early age is vital in understanding the disease and stopping us from making assumptions and forming wrong opinions that may live on till adulthood.
Vanessa
