Turkey ramps up HIV awareness campaign
As the HIV rate among Turks has sharply increased over the last decade, the Turkish government has started raising awareness among university students.
ISTANBUL — Altan (a pseudonym) cried for two hours after his doctor told him he was infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Following his diagnosis, he searched online for more information about the disease, as he had not learned about sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) while in school.
During his research, the 29-year-old realized he wasn’t alone.
Until Turkey's Ministry of Health released a report last year about HIV/AIDS, it had simply advocated for abstinence. The number of people with HIV in Turkey has spiked 465% in a decade, the highest HIV growth rate in the world, according to Hacettepe University in Ankara, one of the researchers of the report. According to information from the 2017 National AIDS Congress, 45,000 cases of HIV have gone unreported while 16,700 people live with the disease on the record.
Every year, roughly 100 people in Turkey who are HIV positive develop AIDS.
