26% of young people aged 15 to 24 mistakenly believe that there are drugs to cure AIDS, according to a new Ifop survey.
A few days before the Sidaction weekend, it is clear that misconceptions about the disease die hard. According to an Ifop-Bilendi survey * published on Wednesday March 21, 26% of French people aged 15 to 24 wrongly think that there are drugs to cure AIDS (13% more than in 2009), 21% that a vaccine can prevent the transmission of viruses and 32% that they are less likely than others to be infected.
Eve fears
“What is worrying is that these proportions have increased significantly in a fairly small number of years, on things that seemed to have been taken for a long time,” Sidaction general manager Florence Thune told the Parisian. “The lack of information and the fact that we talk less about the HIV virus raise old fears,” she adds.
11% of young people questioned by Ifop think that it is possible to know if a person has AIDS by observing him carefully, when 21% of them imagine that HIV can be transmitted through saliva and kissing , through sweating (18%) or by drinking from the glass of an HIV-positive person (16%).
Ifop-Bilendi survey: young people, information and prevention of #AIDS : 20% of young people consider themselves ill-informed in 2018, an increase of 9 points compared to 2009 #vih https://t.co/zhUHhJmX1Q
– Sidaction (@Sidaction) March 21, 2018
Alarming
20% of young people surveyed also believe that they are poorly informed about the virus, almost twice as many as in 2015 (11%). 48%, for example, do not know of the existence of emergency treatment following a risk-taking and 42% do not know where to go for testing. The association sidaction already judged last year that the lack of information of the French on HIV was “alarming”.
Of the 150,000 people with AIDS in France, 25,000 are unaware that they are HIV positive. In 2016, the number of people who discovered their HIV status was estimated at around 6,000, according to theINVS. The category of men who have sex with men is still the most affected.
* Ifop and Bilendi survey for Sidaction carried out by self-administered online questionnaire from February 6 to 13, 2018 with 1,002 people, representative of the French population aged 15 to 24.
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