You know more about AIDS than your leaders

If you have been watching HIV awareness advertisements on TV or in public places, you are likely to be better informed about the deadly disease than your social, political and religious leaders.

This is the disconcerting discovery made by Amar Vyas, a social worker and official of BJ Medical College's department of community medicine, who conducted a study on the level of awareness about the disease in different sections of society. The tudy was undertaken as part of his PhD thesis.

The aim of Vyas's study was to learn about the attitude, knowledge and behaviour of religious, social and political leaders towards the disease. Talking about his findings, he said that the state and Union governments, as also some NGOs, had been working to spread awareness about the disease in an effort to prevent its spread. "But there is very little public participation in their efforts.

Hence, I wanted to study the level of awareness about HIV/AIDs among social, political and religious leaders who have great influence on society. These leaders can influence people's attitude towards patients of the disease," Vyas said.

He added that he had hoped that the study would help him seek the assistance of these leaders in spreading awareness about the deadly disease with the support of the government or the NGOs.Vyas' study was limited to leaders of Mehsana district. He met and talked to around 150 leaders from different social, religious and political backgrounds."I talked to a wide range of political leaders — from village sarpanchs, taluka and district panchayat members, to MLAs and MPs. The social leaders I talked to include leaders from different communities (such as Patel, Brahmin and Chaudhary), union leaders and leaders of cooperatives in different sectors," Vyas said.

He further said that he had talked to religious leaders of almost all the prominent communities including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Jains.

The main finding of the study is that a majority of the leaders have either no knowledge of the disease or have incorrect information about it. All the leaders interviewed knew that sex with an HIV-infected person causes the spread of the disease but only 60 per cent of the leaders said that condoms should be used during sex.

Political leaders are unique in that they are very well informed about the right to information (RTI) about the disease while religious leaders are worst informed about the ailment, said Vyas. Only 16 per cent of the religious leaders, 34 per cent of the social leaders and 52 per cent of the political leaders interviewed had even basic information about HIV and AIDS, he said.