HIV and AIDS Corporate Awareness Success!!!

On Friday June 1, the Xansa Corp, an outsourcing and technology company welcomed the Wake Up Pune team to their headquarters. The main lobby was kindly provided to spread HIV awareness through slide presentations, HIV knowledge quizzes, and a kiosk promoting the Wake Up Pune Campaign that employees could access at their own convenience. While enjoying their breaks, they had the opportunity to purchase some beautiful jewelry, pillowcases, purses and scarves made by women living with HIV from Sahara Aalhad in Delhi. All proceeds went to better the facilities provided by Sahara Aalhad Residential Care and Rehabilitation Centre. Staff were also provided with accurate information about the transmission of HIV, how they can protect themselves and their loved ones, and learned how HIV and AIDS Stigma and Discrimination indirectly fuel the spread of a disease that now has become an epidemic in their own city. The many myths surrounding HIV transmission were theatrically broken through short skits followed up by the truth about HIV transmission. The performance entitled the Stigma Chakra vividly portrayed how Silence, Ignorance, Fear, Stigma and Discrimination further the spread of HIV within the community. Michael Marshall of Sahara Aalhad in Pune spoke about the REALITY of HIV in this city and let the corporate sector know that their socioeconomic status will not protect them from a virus that currently infects 5.7 million people in their country. The primary message conveyed was that HIV does not discriminate, but we discriminate against people living with HIV and AIDS and those that seek accurate information in order to protect themselves. More importantly, upon receiving this newfound knowledge about HIV, the employees gained a sense of agency in protecting themselves and had the opportunity to sign up to volunteer or receive even more information. The feedback received was positive, as many were surprised at how inaccurate their previous understanding of HIV was and really wanted to know more. In fact, many signed up to volunteer and receive more information.
In one short day, this group of young professionals gained much insight into how HIV is affecting their community, and learned how breaking the silence and spreading the knowledge they gained can help end the stigma chakra and combat HIV in Pune. The employess at Xansa were told to WAKE UP to the reality of HIV in Pune. Many were shocked to hear the truth, and the truth is that 1.8% of Pune’s population is currently infected. Unofficial figures report that about 2.3% of the population is HIV+, more than twice the national average. We all need to wake up! The reality is that HIV is in Pune!! Breaking the myth that this virus only infects the poor or is a product of perceived immoral behaviour is vital in effectively preventing HIV and AIDS, as well as bettering the lives of the many neglected and stigmatized individuals living with HIV. The employees were told to be more POSITIVE about HIV. This attitude means being Positive about educating ourselves and others about HIV/AIDS, being Positive about raising awareness in our wider community and being Positive about reaching out to people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS.

The distancing effect in the media

Everyday for the past week or so I have been going through the Times of India and Indian Express desperately searching for articles about HIV and AIDS. Most days, there is no mention of the virus that is now an EPIDEMIC in the city of Pune. On June 13th however, I found two. My excitement quickly turned to disappointment upon reading them both.
The article featured in the Indian Express titled, “Symposium to strengthen police response to HIV” was about a symposium to increase HIV awareness among police officers in Pune. While I agree that any HIV awareness campaign is important, what aggravated me was the rational behind the symposium. The rational was that police officers require HIV education more than other sectors of society because of their close contact with the groups deemed most at risk for HIV. These “risk groups” consisted of sex workers, drug users and men who have sex with men (MSM). Why is this a problem? It is a problem because once again, HIV information was presented in relation to specific groups and NOT the specific routes of transmission that put ANYONE at risk. Framing HIV and AIDS information in such a way causes the majority, who do not belong to these groups, to distance themselves from HIV and AIDS and decrease their own risk perception. The rationality of the masses then becomes, “HIV is not my problem”. As a result, so few feel the need to get tested, practice safe sex, educate themselves and others about HIV and AIDS, and finally, this type of discourse fuels even more stigma and discrimination directed towards people living with HIV. Saying that HIV exists among sex workers, drug users and MSM (disliked groups of society whose behaviour is perceived as immoral), perpetuates the myth that HIV is caused by immoral behaviour. HIV does not judge and is a virus with very specific biological traits that enters the body through very specific routes. Instead, the masses have a false sense of safety because of their detachment from “immoral” conduct. The effect is so implicit that we don’t even notice how powerful this phenomenon is.
What's more upsetting is that this article had the ability to educate so many people about HIV transmission and prevention!!! Instead, it only perpetuated the myth that HIV exists only among certain groups in society. The truth is that AIDS does not discriminate, and has now seeped into all sectors of society: rich, poor, male, female, educated, uneducated, etc. The only thing that can protect a person from HIV is the truth and the agency to apply this truth. Instead, we continuously reinforce the myths about HIV and AIDS through the reporting of so-called “facts”. A cycle that has resulted in a HIV prevalence in Pune that is twice the national average. When will this cycle stop?!
It certainly didn’t stop in the second article I came across in The Times of India, titled “AIDS: How it’s creeping into our lives: Nari Study focuses on Women Who Denied Being CSWs But Sought Treatment for STI”.
The title alone is misleading. It implies that women who have STIs are commercial sex workers in denial of their profession. The article then goes on to report that the majority of these women are married and have never had more than one sexual partner. Does that sound like a commercial sex worker to you???!!! The article gets even more ludicrous when it explicitly states that the women in the study are not representative of women in Pune in general, who apparently have a much lower HIV prevalence. I repeat, of the 1.,021 women in this study, the majority were married and had only one sexual partner. Does this not sound like a representative sample to you? How are they more like commercial sex workers than average Indian women who follow the traditions and customs of their society? The contradictions were endless, and the way this article managed to take this scientific study about HIV and women, and make it about commercial sex workers was preposterous!
While both articles did stress the importance of educating police officers and women who are at risk for STIs, they failed to mention the importance of educating ALL people. The opportunity to do just that was lost, once again, and the cycle of IGNORANCE and DENIAL continues……

A Failed Opportunity

In this field there is a constant struggle to find platforms from which to spread our messages. These messages are sometimes of awareness, sometimes of acceptance, and sometimes of debunking myth; and almost always a combination of these and many other things. We often have to concentrate weeks or months of effort on a single day to reach out, such as the recent 20 May event. Sometimes we reach 10 people, sometimes we reach 1,000.
I wonder what the daily circulation of the Indian Express is? Undoubtedly this newspaper reaches more people directly in a single day than we can hope to reach via many of our outreach activities. The news and information about the world is presented in black and white on your doorstep every morning. What an opportunity.
The title of this blog however is, A FAILED OPPORTUNITY. Newspapers like the Indian Express have a duty to not only tell the news, but to inform their readers.
At our press conferences we always hand our press information kids and give them resources to better inform their writing about HIV and AIDS. It is dreadfully clear however that these sheets are often discarded before an article is penned.
The article on June 5, 2007 regarding HIV infection in migrant labourers in Bilur is not the first time that The Indian Express has been complicet (perhaps unknowingly so) in perpetuating misinformation and distorted views regarding the virus. Going through the article word by word I can see so many opportunities for the author to help us, and help Pune by reaching all the readers and correcting misconceptions.
In the first paragraph an interview with an infected man quotes him as saying, "I don't think I will live more than two years. I was not aware that I would get disease after having sex with prostitutes. But now it is too late" At this point the author misses the opportunity to do a great service to their readership by informing them that the infected man may likely live for much longer than two years if newly infected man keeps to proper nutrition or gets access to ART treatment (also a good point to point out that this is theoretically provided by the government although despite the 5.7 Million people living with HIV in India, the government only targeted 100,000 to receive free ART and only 18,000 of those people actually received their drugs). So perhaps if this system got smoothed out, people like this migrant labourer in Bilur could live with the virus as a chronic condition as many do in the west. He also states that he didn't realize that he would get the disease after having sex with a prostitute. Firstly, it isn't a disease...it is a virus. Secondly, you don't automatically get it from having sex with a prostitute, nor can you only get it from having sex with a prostitute. With any sex, the key word is unprotected. The notion that having protected sex with a prostitute will prevent HIV transmission might be seen as promoting behavior that is not in accord with Indian morality or something and it is unlikely that Indian Express would publish such a truthful statement. If your wife is HIV positive and you have unprotected sex with her, you have a better chance of getting the virus than having protected sex with a prostitute whose status you do not know. However, this should not endorse any form of high risk behavior, but rather it would be a good time to either promote condom use or debunk some of the stereotypes that are continuously propagated to the detriment of workers like us who try to keep stigma from furthering the spread of the virus.
The article also commonly uses the term HIV/AIDS. We have stopped using this within our organization because of the connotation that they are the same thing. They are NOT. HIV is a virus that attacks your immune system, yet which can be fought for many years with the right combination of nutrition and ART, AIDS is a condition resulting from unchecked HIV driving your immune system into the ground so that you are susceptible to AIDS defining illnesses or opportunistic infections that can kill you. You DO NOT die of HIV, you do however die of AIDS related illnesses. They are different and you can be a very healthy PLHIV without being intrisically progressed through sematics to having AIDS, which is fatal.
In another paragraph it talks about a marriage being cancelled because of a positive HIV test. This bit of reporting could have been dovetailed with information on how to deal with HIV within marriage through safe sex and HIV in pregnancy through an ART regimen.
Later in the article, after again calling HIV a disease rather than a virus, it quotes a politician as saying that having more than 1 percent of his constituency infected is a "cause for concern". This should certainly say that if this one village politician is concerned by 1 percent than all of Maharashtra and all of India should be concerned because the country looms near that mark while areas of Maharashtra double it.
The article does mention that cultural and language barriers hinder access to medical assistance and treatment, but overall the article is severely lacking in doing justice to the news item.
I often think that news in general exists on the misery of the world, so perhaps it is that in doing something to allay this misery, the news corporations believe that they are taking away future business from themselves. Why else would they not use this opportunity to educate further on the issues that they raise. The article focuses only on a gloomy situation and indeeds tries to cast it in even a deeper pall than is necessary rather than using the platform to educate.