Worrying attitudes amongst Kenyan youth towards HIV/AIDS

A small-scale discussion group on youth attitudes to sexuality and HIV/AIDS by the Kenya AIDS Intervention Prevention Project Group (KAIPPG) in Kakamega, western Kenya, has suggested that young Kenyans remain seriously misinformed about AIDS, and that many continue to engage in unsafe sexual practices.

Alarmingly, volunteer staff with the project found that some people believed that condoms had been infected with the AIDS virus in an effort to eradicate Africans, the group warned in a report newly posted on the website of the One World network - www.oneworld.org.

The young people involved in the KAIPPG exercise - a small and informal discussion group, yet suggestive of attitudes that may be more widespread - had generally learned what they did know about sex and sexuality, sexually-transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS from their friends, and believed it was impossible to have discussions on such themes with their parents, according to project workers.

On AIDS, the youths interviewed had very general ideas about the disease - that it spreads through exchange of bodily fluids and that sex was the most common way of protracting it, KAIPPG stated.

However, among the myths picked up by project workers from the discussion were that: having sex with younger partners can avoid sexually transmitted infections and AIDS; that withdrawal before ejaculation and cleaning the private parts with a tissue can protect against AIDS; that free condoms [distributed by the government] have been smeared with the AIDS virus to eradicate Africans; and that taking unprescribed antibiotics immediately after sex would prevent infection with sexually-transmitted diseases.

Meanwhile, prevention strategies must do much more to reach young people, according to a new report from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Roughly half of the more than 60 million people infected with HIV over the past 20 years became infected between the ages of 15 and 24, according to the latest issue of Population Reports published by the Population Information Programme at the School's Centre for Communication Programmes.

In countries worst affected by the epidemic little can be done to reduce the number of deaths to young people in the near term, according to the Hopkins report. Infected adolescents - because they are likely to have been recently infected - are at their most infectious stage.

Sexually active young people are more likely to have a series of sex partners, too, so they can spread HIV more rapidly. If these adolescents changed their behaviour, the spread of the epidemic could be slowed. In countries where the epidemic is already generalised, a combined focus on youth and on high-risk groups - such as drug injectors, street kids, and sex workers - would be the most effective. Models suggest that such a campaign could have the same impact at only 20 percent of the cost of a broad national campaign.