ALTHOUGH the national anti-stigma campaign featuring healthy-looking persons living with HIV has had the reverse effect on some Jamaicans, one of the individuals featured in the series of television advertisements says the impact would have been worse had the decision been taken to use people who show physical signs of the disease.

Ainsley Reid, co-ordinator of the Greater Involvement of Persons Living with HIV and AIDS (GIPA) — who was featured extensively in the television adverts — said many Jamaicans are failing to believe that he is HIV positive since he still shows no physical signs of the disease 22 years after he was first diagnosed.

According to Reid, there is the perception that by seeing a healthy face, some people think nothing is wrong with contracting the disease. As such, he said, smaller face-to-face sessions have become necessary to give people an opportunity to ask questions and learn more about the disease.

“If I should tell you the number of people — old people, middle-age, young people — who have approached me for sex since the advertisement because they don’t believe and so there is that side that you will never hear about it until I speak about it in a one-on-one session,” Reid told reporters and editors at the weekly Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange at the newspaper’s head offices in Kingston.

However, he said despite the feedback, the situation would be made worse if the advertisements had featured sickly-looking people.

“People [would start believing] that they can tell if someone is HIV positive because ‘this is how AIDS people look’; so if you are healthy and strong-looking you don’t have HIV. So, we have to be engaging the population in a conversation around how they think HIV people should look,” Reid argued.

“It is significant for us that… we don’t see sick people on the TV because the next person who goes to get tested next week needs to know that they are not going to look sick in three days. That helps the person to feel that they can live a normal life, including having sex, as long as they are taught to take full responsibility of how they live their lives,” Reid said.

Meanwhile, Audi Brevett, behaviour change communication co-ordinator at the National Family Planning Board, said that much of the board’s studies show that people think they can tell by looking at someone if they are HIV positive.

But, according to Brevett, HIV presents itself in a way that looks like a lot of things.

“I have seen people with chronic illnesses that look like they have HIV and that helps to drive the stigma and the discrimination,” she said

What went into the anti-stigma campaigns, she said, had a lot to do with not feeding the negative which helps to drive the stigma

and discrimination, but look at another aspect where someone cannot tell by looking.

Reid, at the same time, said people living with HIV (PLHIV) are now advocating for greater levels of psycho social support to be made available to them in the public health facilities in order to improve that aspect of their life. This, as the issue of disclosure is a big issue for the PLHIV community and rightly so, as Reid said this has long-lasting effects not only on the individual but also their family and community.

According to Reid, in order to engage more persons in anti-stigma campaigns as was done with Rosie Stone, Jason Richards, Anisha Taylor and himself, they have to be properly prepared.

“They (the national programme) also have to be willing to educate our families around the issue of our going public; so it is not as easy as the public would want to think …you get a person living with HIV and you put them in the media and say this is a face; there is a whole range of preparation that needs to take place because disclosure can have serious consequences,” he said.

Reid said if the PLHIV community were to advocate for more interventions like the anti-stigma campaigns, they would have to

keep in mind the social and economic situations of persons living with the disease.

“Many of us are not working and can barely take care of our families, so it takes quite a lot of resources to hold campaigns like these. But you can’t just put someone in the public domain and then tomorrow, what happens when it is finished, they go back to square one,” he explained.

He said as a result, they are pushing for a national programme to boost their self-esteem.

“We feel PLHIV ought to be treated with greater dignity because many of us now have very low self-esteem and self- worth and we need help to address that,” Reid said.