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Cultural Management of Stigma and HIV/AIDS in a Nigerian Ethnic Group

The study examined how cultural management of stigma influences the impact of HIV/AIDS among people living with HIV/AIDS in an Igbo ethnic group in Nigeria. The traditional ways of caring for the sick among the Igbos has been eroded by modernization and improvement in the health sector. However, a disease like HIV/AIDS is dreaded as a disease that does not have a cure and attributed to witchcraft infliction in the area. Thus, people living with the virus receive little attention from relatives and health care providers in health institutions in this area and thus increase the vulnerability of those infected.

A total of 914 respondents were interviewed in two locations in both rural and urban locations and results were corroborated by focus group discussions to increase the participation of community leaders and Development Partners in addressing cultural practices and values that promote the transmission of HIV/AIDS and limits the participation of relatives of people living with HIV/AIDS in the provision of care to the sick.

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Correspondence to Christian Okemgbo.

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Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Okemgbo, C., Moughalu, C. & Odimegwu, C. Cultural Management of Stigma and HIV/AIDS in a Nigerian Ethnic Group. Retrovirology 2 (Suppl 1), P73 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-4690-2-S1-P73

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-4690-2-S1-P73

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