1 in 3 ignorant about Aids - poll
2007-11-30 11:46
New York - One in three adults in the world's top industrial democracies say they know little or nothing about Aids, a disease thought to have killed
more than 28 million people in the past 26 years, a poll showed
on Thursday.
But the survey, carried out by Ipsos for the World Vision
charity, found that in the seven countries studied, 44% of respondents would be willing to pay more taxes to combat Aids, including 50% in the United States.
More than 3 500 people in the United States, Canada,
Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan - the Group of Eight
countries minus Russia - were interviewed for the survey,
released ahead of UN World Aids Day on Saturday.
Richard Stearns, president of World Vision US, a
Christian group that says it combats poverty and injustice
worldwide, told a United Nations news conference that millions
were ignorant of Aids because it was "not real" for them.
'Somebody else's problem'
"It's not personal, it is somebody else's problem and
somebody else's disease, and very often in a place very, very
far away and remote from their everyday lives," he said.
Aids, which attacks the immune system and can be spread by
sexual contact or blood transfusion, was first detected in the
United States in 1981. World Vision says some 6 000 children a
day currently lose a parent to Aids.
The Ipsos poll found that in the countries surveyed,
Canadians were the most concerned about Aids and Japanese the
least. Japan was also the country where the most people - 53% - admitted to little or no knowledge of the disease.
Germans said they were the most knowledgeable, with 80% claiming to know "some" or "a lot" about the issue. The comparable figure for the United States was 70%.
In the countries taken together, one in four people thought
the Aids problem had been "greatly exaggerated" by the media,
the survey said.
Nevertheless, Stearns said he believed the citizens of the
countries polled were "ahead of their governments" in their
view of how much should be done to fight Aids.
"I think that goes contrary to the view in Washington," he
said. "I don't think Washington realises that that many
Americans care about Aids at that level.
"So in a way it gives them the political cover to do more
because ... when you have 50% of the country saying 'you
could raise my taxes if you could use that money to do more for
HIV and Aids,' that's a message that our politicians I think
are not aware of," he said.
The United Nations says some 33 million people worldwide
are infected by HIV, the virus that causes Aids, including
those who have developed the illness.