03
February
2019
|
00:16
Asia/Singapore

Public attitudes of HIV have not moved beyond narratives of fear, prejudice from early years of global epidemic

Assoc Prof Hsu Li Yang, Head of the Infectious Diseases Programme and Mr Rayner Tan, a PhD candidate and researcher on HIV, both at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at NUS, shared that public perceptions and attitudes towards people living with HIV have not changed beyond fear and prejudice from the early years of the epidemic. This is despite the fact that advances in medical science, which, coupled with a regime of lifetime medication, has reduced HIV infection from a death sentence to a chronic disease, with life expectancies close to that of an individual without the HIV virus.