Youth group pursues stigma-free new title for HIV
An international youth advocacy group on Thursday commemorated this year’s World AIDS Day with a call to rename HIV to help de-stigmatise the now treatable Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
“The term ‘HIV’ is lethal. The virus, now more of a chronic disease, does not need to be,’’ members of Youth Against Aids wrote in an open letter to the director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
While the unattended virus can lead to the immune deficiency disease AIDS, it can be easily treated and even rendered untransmittable.
However, HIV remains “an epidemic of the mind’’ due in large part to more than four decades of shame, prejudice and false beliefs,’’ the letter continued.
Changing the name would help change attitudes towards the virus and more than 38 million people who live with it around the world, it said.
The group did not make its own proposals for a new name. Rather, readers were asked to make their own suggestions via a website that can be reached with a QR code under the letter.
Such a name change has its precedents: In November, the WHO said it would over the course of a year phase out the name monkeypox in favour of Mpox to help curb discrimination and stigma towards sufferers.
