Gender inequalities in HIV/AIDS. Table 1 reports response rates, samples size and prevalence of HIV/AIDS by gender, country and survey year. Silverfast download. Women had a significantly higher prevalence of HIV/AIDS than men in all countries and years sampled, apart from Burkina Faso in 2003 and 2010, Mali in 2006, Niger in 2006, Sao Tome & Principe in 2008/09, Senegal in 2011 and Sierra Leone in 2011.

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The social context of the early HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States provided fertile ground for rumors about transmission. Today, however, rumors about HIV/AIDS persist only within the African American public. Focus group and public discourse data reveal the content and distribution of HIV/AIDS origin and conspiracy rumors.

Rumor and contemporary legend theory allows reinterpretation of rumors as a measure of trust between the African American public and health professionals, not as evidence of ignorance or of historical racial oppression. To improve public health results in the African American community, HIV/AIDS efforts must acknowledge the sources and meanings of rumors, include rumors as a measure of trust, and address the underlying distrust that the rumors signify. Despite major advances in knowledge about the HIV virus, modes of transmission, and treatments that can reduce viral load and extend life, the spread of HIV among African Americans, especially African American men who have sex with men, has remained stubbornly resistant to interventions. As of 2006, 48.1% of new HIV infections in the United States were attributable to male-to-male sexual contact; African Americans had an HIV prevalence rate of 1715.1 per 100 000 (2388 per 100 000 for men and 1122 per 100 000 for women), whereas the rate for Whites was 224.3 per 100,000 (394 per 100 000 for men and 62.7 per 100 000 for women). These persistent high rates among African Americans run counter to the experience of most populations in the United States, for whom better knowledge about HIV/AIDS has led to reductions in morbidity and mortality, as shown in the following diagram. These relationships, however, work only if people trust the sources of official information. This applies equally to prevention and treatment: no HIV/AIDS program that requires action by the public—however valid or well-originated—can succeed when people distrust the program’s sponsors or the sources of information about the disease.

Understanding the forces that cause and sustain distrust among African Americans is essential to reducing rates of HIV infection, and this requires recognition of the role of HIV/AIDS rumors—their origins, spread, and capacity to resist contrary information.Initially, AIDS rumors were widespread, because the social context provided what rumor theorists have identified as fertile ground for the growth and persistence of rumors: a dearth of trusted information in conjunction with high levels of social anxiety. Furthermore, the trust and knowledge networks that support rumors are typically bound by the same elements of social stratification that constitute racial and ethnic identities and subgroups; people circulate stories to people they know and trust, and only retell stories with meaning or resonance. Rumors about HIV/AIDS proliferated throughout US society: only gay people can get AIDS; you can catch it from a doorknob, a toilet seat, or a swimming pool; flying insects can transmit it; women are tricking men into having sex with them so they can give them AIDS; AIDS was developed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to kill off African Americans and gays; it’s not caused by a virus at all. As the emerging HIV/AIDS crisis forced scientists and health professionals to change their habits and practices, partly because of the science of the virus but largely because of effective social activism by AIDS-affected lay groups, those same groups invested their faith in the health professions community. They demanded action commensurate with the health crisis: scientific knowledge to replace fears, ignorance, and uninformed suppositions. And they succeeded; as solid, official information developed, general anxiety about HIV/AIDS slowly receded, and so did the stories—most HIV/AIDS rumors have disappeared. Within the African American community, however, specific rumors continue to persist, rumors that understand HIV/AIDS as a genocidal government plot against African Americans.

METHODS OF DATA COLLECTIONThis analysis relies on 2 sources of data. (1) I performed a qualitative review of the public discourse about HIV/AIDS in the “Black Press,” on the Internet, and in other public arenas. (The Black Press, which dates to 1827 in the United States, continues to be a media sector that originates in, caters to, and represents the ideas and issues of the African American community. African Americans invest higher levels of trust and research in the Black Press than in the mainstream press; despite large overlap between the two, this suggests that African Americans and Whites in the United States constitute separate audiences.) (2) I conducted a series of 6 race/ethnicity-segregated focus group interviews populated according to the self-identified race/ethnicity of participants: 2 each for Whites, Hispanics, and African Americans. I identified the public discourse on rumors regarding HIV/AIDS by tracking down such stories wherever they appeared. This “discursive snowball sampling” led from large searchable databases, newspaper articles, and magazines to advertisements, television shows, and standup comedy routines—any kind of public reference to HIV/AIDS rumors or conspiracy stories.

Once new sources began reliably referring back to ones already located, it became clear that the search had reached an important level of closure.I collected focus group data in a series of 6 focus group interviews over a 2-year period with members of a college community in the northeastern United States. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 53 years and skewed heavily toward women, reflecting the population from which they were drawn; 29 individuals participated, and focus groups ranged in size from 3 to 9 participants. I solicited participants by using posters, social networks, and in-class announcements; I organized the individual groups on the basis of sign-ups by prospective participants into 1 of the 3 race/ethnicity groups: African American, Hispanic/Latino, or White. At the conclusion of each interview, participants had an opportunity to ask questions and make additional comments off the record. They also received my contact information for follow-up questions and a 2-page information sheet detailing the “best knowledge and practices” about such topics as what HIV is, the origins of HIV, the evidence connecting HIV and AIDS, how to prevent transmission, and ways to get tested. I recorded digitally and transcribed the interviews.Participants were prompted to relate, discuss, mention, or retell stories that they had heard; when the discussion lagged or did not develop rumors, as the focus group moderator I used prods, such as “What have you heard about needle exchange programs?” or “Have you ever heard strange stories about who might have been responsible for HIV/AIDS?” Confidentiality was assured (all participants signed consent forms), and no personal information or medical histories were solicited. THE CONTEXTS FOR ANALYZING RUMORSAccording to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the most important variables associated with continued high HIV transmission rates are.likelihood of having unprotected sex with someone who is either infected with HIV or at high risk for infection,.injection drug use,.having another sexually transmitted disease,.unknown HIV status,.social stigma associated with being a man who has sex with men, and.socioeconomic factors that contribute to poor health care.All of these address behaviors, however, not social status or attitudes toward health care.

Public health research cites 3 explanations for African American “exceptionalism” to HIV/AIDS prevention efforts. First, the African American community finds itself on the wrong end of a constellation of variables associated with high transmission rates: education, motivation, recognized self-worth, and access to condoms.

The second stresses aspects of interpersonal, group, and status-based relationships (e.g., “sex on the down low,” describing men who identify as heterosexual but secretly engage in sex with men, even while in relationships with women) that interfere with a host of well-established preventive measures. The third has to do with deep and abiding distrust for the institutions and intentions of Western (US) medicine and public health. Of the 3 explanations, the problem of distrust might seem the easiest to address.Conventional wisdom posits that education opens the mind, dispels misconceptions, and can change behaviors—a formulation that is generally valid. But to be effective, education efforts require trust. For this reason, using knowledge—“education”—to defeat distrust has been, and is likely to remain, unsuccessful as long as there are high levels of distrust within the African American community. Distrust reflected and reinforced by cultural narratives—stories, rumors—cannot easily be displaced by information. Public health efforts to slow the rate of HIV transmission among African Americans cannot succeed without an understanding of how rumors that begin in an environment of distrust develop, persist, and influence behavior.Distrust based on experience might be addressed by better behavior, promises of future actions, or the simple passage of time.

But one of the most problematic features of a distrust based on rumors is that, as narratives, rumors are relatively impervious to falsifiability: you cannot disprove a story told and retold by a “friend of a friend”—it’s “just a story.” Recent scholarship argues that conspiracy rumors can no longer be dismissed as the result of a “paranoid style,” but should be seen as strategies used by the disempowered to reconceptualize, contend with, or resist mainstream worldviews that contradict lived experiences. These interpretations validate conspiracy theory rumors as legitimate discourse, and provide a basis for understanding the power of HIV/AIDS rumors within the African American community. RUMORS OF GENOCIDE AND DISTRUST IN THE DATAEvidence of distrust is clearly visible in stories about the origins of HIV/AIDS. The 4 quotations in (arranged chronologically) illustrate the range of accounts about the origins of HIV/AIDS and the extent to which different rumors exist among different groups. Two come from the public discourse and 2 from focus group interviews. The first and third quotations, from 1992 and 2012, instantiate the consistent theme found in both public African American discourse and among African American focus group participants. To find a rumor faithfully repeated after 2 decades demonstrates remarkable durability.

Substantively, the 2 quotations implicate the government, the main institution responsible for contending with HIV/AIDS, and ascribe intentional, genocidal motives for the creation and epidemiology of the epidemic. Who, finding such stories even mildly plausible, would trust a government agency or program that declares it is working “to help”? YearQuotationSource1992“I’m convinced AIDS is a government-engineered disease. They got one thing wrong, they never realized it couldn’t just be contained to the groups it was intended to wipe out. So now it’s a national priority. Exactly like drugs became when they escaped the urban centers into White suburbia.”Spike Lee, in an advertisement for Benetton, in Rolling Stone magazine2001‘‘People eat chimpanzees,’’ Dr. The 6 focus group interviews were conducted by the author in 2012–2014, with members of a college community in the northeastern United States.

The interviews were segregated according to the self-identified race/ethnicity of the participants: 2 interviews each for Whites, Hispanics, and African Americans.The quotation from 2001 is not a rumor; it is a mainstream press presentation of the consensus scientific findings on the origins of HIV; it contradicts the other 3 quotations. For most people, this explanation is the “authoritative” story of the origins of HIV/AIDS (in some form). White and Hispanic/Latino focus group participants reliably reported it, though sometimes with minor alterations (no one specifically mentioned “the hunting or preparation of meat,” for example).The fourth quotation is an HIV/AIDS rumor that is prevalent among US Whites (it appeared in both White group interviews), and, like many rumors, relates something “I heard”—“a funny story.” Like the conspiracy rumors, this story distorts the scientific finding, but it places responsibility for the origins of the epidemic on “somebody who had sex with a monkey”—in Africa. An HIV origin rumor that blames bestiality among Africans comes from a very different relationship to the health professions than one that blames doctors, researchers, and the US government, and also has little effect on the group’s status or response to public health advice; it becomes a “funny story.”Dave Chappelle has a comedy routine that satirically calls Africans having sex with monkeys the “scientific explanation” for the origins of HIV/AIDS.

UNDERSTANDING THE DISTRUST AS HISTORY OR EXPERIENCED CULTUREIn different and sometimes overlapping ways, the rumors described here can be understood as (1) the result of historical experiences that have engendered distrust, (2) a result of continuing distrust, and (3) an indication of social anxieties associated with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, drug use (as a source of HIV and as an arm of the genocide attempt), and African Americans’ place in American society. Establishing a genuinely trusting relationship between the public health professions and the African American community may be the only way to put rumors on the same road to extinction as rumors about mosquitos transmitting HIV.Establishing trust poses real challenges, however; whether it is a consequence of collective memory or lived experience, African Americans are less likely than nearly any other ethnic or racial group in the United States to trust mainstream institutions.

Specific distrust for health professions adds another multiplier. CONCLUSIONSAs the HIV/AIDS crisis begins its fourth decade, with ambiguities about origins, transmission, and treatments resolved in most sectors of society, there is some concern that the general population has become complacent about HIV/AIDS.

The persistence of genocide rumors within the African American public found in this research, however, demonstrates that for African Americans, social anxieties have not been addressed; high HIV infection rates don’t appear to be the result of complacency. Changing behaviors will change infection rates, but behavior changes ultimately rely on trust. The nature of the rumors that developed in the African American public was never the same as those in the general population. One thing that is challenging about their existence and persistence is not their agreement or disagreement with views of historical events but their apparent independence of history.Misunderstanding distrust can compound distrust. In terms of epidemiology, US health professionals typically respond to the HIV/AIDS origin conspiracy stories both correctly and counterproductively.

When health professionals see conspiracy rumors as evidence of ignorance that interferes with efforts to change behaviors, they risk reifying the trust gap, by labeling the person (the nonexpert) who has concerns as “ignorant.” To dismiss or ignore genuine concerns about racial health disparities because they express themselves through distrust of logical, salient, and valid health professions initiatives confuses cause and effect. Thus, the conversation can become a struggle about who gets to control the tone and content of the discourse, and the side that suffers the depredations of the disease is also expected to surrender the discursive disputation about meaning—about the lived experience of a social group burdened with racism.There are 3 important approaches to understanding the rumors about HIV/AIDS in the African American community. For folklorists—and for a deeper understanding of the social and cognitive dynamics that underlie the rumors—understanding the origins, meanings, and methods of propagation is inherently important. Addressing the causes of rumors about the origins and transmission of HIV/AIDS forms the basis of the research presented here, because their genealogy is inextricably linked to their meaning to the people who hear them, tell them, (sometimes) believe them, and engage in associated behaviors. Second, there is the information that rumors reveal about the anxieties and concerns of the communities where they persist.

28 Stories Of Aids In Africa Pdf Map United States

Clearly, the segments of the African American public (which may be among the most educated segments) that have sustained HIV/AIDS genocide rumors for decades continue to experience substantial social anxiety about extermination, particularly of the type identified in the United Nations resolution of 1949: threats to bodies, unique culture, and social identity. Finally, by understanding what rumors are and the legitimate anxieties they represent, it becomes possible to reframe “ignorance” as “counter-knowledge,” and move beyond “education” toward the kind of cooperation (albeit contentious and at times combative) that raised the level of mutual trust between the US gay (White) community and research and public health institutions. Having suspicions of public institutions and an abiding distrust for official sources of knowledge about HIV/AIDS is not illegitimate.

The question facing public health professionals is how to contend with the situation that the analysis of these rumors reveals.Of course, there are no easy solutions. Distrust that is woven into the fabric of a society stratified by race cannot easily be undone. As stories, however, rumors are mutable and can fade—they are more symptom than cause. More effective public health interventions will require a reconceptualization of HIV/AIDS rumors and narratives not as “mistakes,” or evidence of ignorance or errors of cognition. Rather, genocide conspiracy rumors and narratives within the African American public make more sense as what Waters called examples of “ethnosociology,” with the understanding that “believers will be better acquainted with the social facts that are explained by conspiracy theories.” (p117) A measure as simple as ascertaining the prevalence of rumors in a particular community where an HIV/AIDS initiative will be undertaken—through focus groups with a cross-section of community members—can alert public health workers to the level of distrust (detecting rumors as a measure of distrust). Even providing a forum where rumors can be openly spoken about may also help displace them.

In this research, off-the-record comments by participants expressed relief and pleasure at having had a chance to participate in discussions where they could speak freely and without judgment about the stories they recounted.No magic bullet can defeat rumors, but acknowledging the social facts about their origins and effects, and tracking changes in rumors, are necessary first steps to contending with them as part of the real social landscape in which public health education and other measures take place; rumors are neither static or epiphenomenal. Ultimately, only greater trust within the community can reduce the underlying function that rumors serve. Until that happens, awareness of the role, implications, and prevalence of rumors must inform and assist efforts by health professionals to contend with the preventable spread of HIV/AIDS.