KNOWLEDGE AND PERCEPTION OF HIV/AIDS RISK BEHAVIOUR AMONG THE STUDENTS
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KNOWLEDGE AND PERCEPTION OF HIV/AIDS RISK BEHAVIOUR AMONG THE STUDENTS
Chapter one
INTRODUCTION
Background of the study.
The HIV/AIDS pandemic continues to pose a massive public health challenge around the world. According to studies conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa, the infections have disproportionately affected young people. New HIV infections are mainly among young individuals aged 15 to 24 years old, known as youth.
Adolescents’ physical, physiological, social, and economic characteristics make them especially susceptible to HIV infections. Young adults are also vulnerable as a result of high-risk sexual activities, attitudes, and limits in the societies in which they grow up.
More specifically, peer pressure to get luxury items such as expensive clothing, jewellery, fashionable hair styles, accessories, and makeup drives young women to participate in transactional sex.
Youths account for 60% of HIV/AIDS patients and 40% of new infections in Africa (Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, 2006; Okonta, 2007; Bankole, A.A Biddlecom, G. Guiella, S. Singh, and E. Zulu, 2007).
This pandemic has taken the lives of people all across the world, particularly those of working age, which are young adults aged twenty-five to forty-five.
This means that people become ill and die during the years when they are most economically productive and are expected to play the most important roles as providers and carers in families and communities, threatening the economic development of countries severely affected by the disease (Alutu, 2000; UNAIDS 2001).
One of the ten Millennium progress Goals (MDGs) is to prevent new infections and the spread of the pandemic, which has the potential to harm economic progress.
In most countries, the HIV epidemic is driven by behaviours that put people at risk of infection. Information on knowledge, as well as the amount and severity of risk behaviour associated to HIV/AIDS, is critical for identifying populations most vulnerable to HIV infections and better comprehending the pandemic’s dynamics.
Nigerian young adults are disproportionately affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and many are unaware of their personal risk behaviours that put them at risk of infection.
Universities in underdeveloped nations, particularly Nigeria, provide a high risk for HIV/AIDS transmission due to the large number of young people who experiment with sex.
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) pathogen, which causes AIDS, has become a serious worry for the Nigerian government, and since the advent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic during the last few decades, the government has faced the task of finding a long-term solution to this fatal disease.
The sickness has caused health, social, and developmental problems for all Nigerian citizens. The virus presents a significant challenge to science and humanity, threatening the very advances made by man in the field of medicine to improve life expectancy.
As of today, no cure has been discovered for this epidemic. All efforts on financial and material resources have failed to produce a discernible outcome, with over twenty million people dead and 3.01 million persons infected with the virus in Nigeria, as supported by (Nwqangu, 2006).
The HIV/AIDS crisis has been scary, therefore UNAIDS (2004) named the 1990s to be the decade of AIDS, revealing that there were many people infected with the virus. The increasing prevalence of this infectious disease has concentrated on certain groups in our society, including women, youths, and commercial sex workers.
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