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Abstract
Sub-Saharan Africa and Cameroon in particular are experiencing a persistence and consistency in the incidence rates in chronic sexual infections such as HIV and HBV. The prevalence rates stands between 8-10% for HBV and 4.3% for HIV in the general population. Surveys on therapeutic results show more challenges in the management of HIV than HBV. This disparity is due to the differences in perceptions and representations, although similar in pathogenic forms, modes of transmission and chronicity. A call to compare these differences that creates fear, shame and guilt towards HIV compared to HBV, thus, preventing many patients from disclosing their HIV statuses and exposing uninfected partners. A health education system that embraces health beliefs highly needed to demystify the mystery around HIV. This study explains the reasons for negative perceptions with stigma resulting to therapeutic challenges in the management process. A qualitative study that uses in-depth interviews and participant observations on a sample population of about 250 patients undergoing therapeutic education sessions, collected data, analyzed and interpreted using the content analyzes model. Findings show that, negative perceptions towards HIV are the cause of therapeutic challenges. Need to integrate socio-cultural realities in strategies to demystify this prejudice around HIV.
Highlights
Health beliefs are an important part of the African culture that cannot be wiped out or totally transformed by forces of modernization
The epistemological gap of this study is to show how the patients’ perception of HIV contributes to therapeutic challenges
HIV has been denied because it is a disease that came from ‘outside’ (Western world), and must be defended or rejected as an outside enemy. Rejection in this sense is a cultural causing HIV and HBV to be perceived as ‘strange and a foreign diseases’. These infections not recognized in the African indigenous health system
Summary
Health beliefs are an important part of the African culture that cannot be wiped out or totally transformed by forces of modernization. A cause for the development of negative health beliefs is that reject these infections. Stigma developed towards infected persons has caused many patients to refuse or fell reluctant to seek medical help. Rather, they opted to seek for alternative therapies. Attitudes and behaviors often constitute the responses towards infected and affected persons. Attitudes such as name-calling by the social entourage, labeling by the medical corps, rejection by close relations, and discrimination in the daily life activities resulting from stereotypes and prejudgments and the classification of certain social classes as high-risk. Efforts to fight the epidemic of HIV and HBV have been influenced by the persistence of these perceptions
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