HIV Testing

The Global Fund wanted communication recommendations to increase demand for HIV testing in West Africa, in order to reach the UNAIDS target of diagnosing 90% of people living with the virus. Côte d'Ivoire's National AIDS Control Program (PNLS) expressed interest in having the necessary survey carried out in the country.

We carried out an anthropological study of knowledge and perceptions of HIV and AIDS. It showed that although people knew antiretroviral treatment is effective, many of them paradoxically still equated HIV infection with death. The frightening images of emaciated patients displayed on a massive scale in the 1980s and 1990s were still fueling a fear that keeps people away from testing.

Another paradoxical finding was that adults knew more about treatment than young people did, even though HIV infection is covered at several stages of schooling. This led me to analyze the content of school textbooks, where I found that they almost never mentioned antiretrovirals, still presented progression to AIDS and death as inevitable, and said nothing about the benefit, for an infected person, of getting tested in order to receive treatment.

My main recommendations were to emphasize that with treatment people live as long as anyone else and that you need to get tested to benefit from it, and to revise the content of the school textbooks, which are used in every French-speaking African country.