ABSTRACT
For all the public awareness that has been generated about HIV, relatively few people will have yet come into close contact with someone affected by it. Without the impact of close personal experience, popular beliefs and feelings about HIV may well survive mass media attempts, be it in health education campaigns or episodes of soap operas, to bring the reality home. The task of gaining some measure of popular perceptions of HIV is an ongoing one but ISDD commissioned NOP Market Research Limited to conduct qualitative research with lay and professional people who had no particular experience of, or specific concern with, people with HIV or AIDS. This chapter reports some of their findings and explores general attitudes to ‘caring’, to HIV and AIDS, and finally highlights the flimsy yet clearly negative images held of the HIV-positive woman, drug use and social care in this context.
