Abstract
BackgroundGiven Nigeria’s status as the country with the second highest number of people living with HIV globally, and 9% of the total global burden of HIV being attributable to Nigeria alone in 2013, improving our understanding of the nature of the HIV epidemic in Nigeria is crucial. As HIV-related knowledge may be an important contributor to engagement in preventive behaviours, it is of interest to investigate trends in HIV-related knowledge in Nigeria with the purpose of informing future HIV prevention and education efforts. This study therefore aims to investigate trends in HIV-related knowledge in Nigeria between 2003 and 2013.MethodsData were derived from the 2003-2013 Nigerian Demographic and Health Surveys, and HIV-related knowledge scores were computed based on answers to HIV-related knowledge questions in the surveys. The significance of the difference between HIV-related knowledge across the time points was determined via the Kruskal-Wallis test, and changes in HIV-related knowledge were displayed graphically, stratified by relevant socio-demographic characteristics. ARIMA models were fit to the 2003 to 2013 trend data.ResultsAlthough there was generally a decrease in HIV-related knowledge across most knowledge domains in 2008, an overall increase was observed between 2003 and 2013. Unfortunately however, this was not the case for knowledge of mother-to-child transmission, which decreased between 2003 and 2013. The disparity in knowledge of HIV risk reduction between states also increased over time.ConclusionThese findings suggest that although HIV-related knowledge appears to be increasing overall, future HIV prevention and education programs should focus on specific knowledge domains such as mother-to-child transmission, and on specific states in which HIV-related knowledge remains low.
Highlights
Given Nigeria’s status as the country with the second highest number of people living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) globally, and 9% of the total global burden of HIV being attributable to Nigeria alone in 2013, improving our understanding of the nature of the HIV epidemic in Nigeria is crucial
Data analysis As the distributions of scores for all four HIV-related knowledge domains as well as the overall HIV-related knowledge score were non-normal (3SD > mean) in one or more of the three years, analysis of variance (ANOVA) was not suitable, and the Kruskal-Wallis test was applied to determine whether these distributions differed significantly across the three years
Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models were fit to the 2003-2013 trend in HIV-related knowledge for all knowledge domains
Summary
Given Nigeria’s status as the country with the second highest number of people living with HIV globally, and 9% of the total global burden of HIV being attributable to Nigeria alone in 2013, improving our understanding of the nature of the HIV epidemic in Nigeria is crucial. In working towards the millennium development goal of halting and beginning to reverse the spread of HIV/ AIDS by 2015, Nigeria launched the National Strategic Plan (NSP) to combat HIV/AIDS This program ran from 2010 to 2015, and focused on prevention, aiming to reduce the transmission of the disease through the modification of behavioural practices and improving public HIV-related knowledge [10]. This study will investigate the trends in HIV-related knowledge between 2003 and 2013, and stratify the investigation of these trends by socio-demographic characteristics such as gender and income, in order to determine whether HIV-related knowledge has increased since the implementation of the NSP, and whether this increase differs among sociodemographic groups. The selection of these sociodemographic factors is based on a recent study by the authors, in which logistic regression analyses indicated that factors including poverty, low literacy, and being female, among other factors, are associated with a higher likelihood of having low HIV-related knowledge [12]
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