The UNESCO estimates that in the year 2030, more than forty million adolescents all over the world will become infected by the HIV. The data provided by the National AIDS Registry reveal that the highest number of cases diagnosed from 1981 to June 2005 have been in the interval between 25 and 34 years old. The higher incidence of unwanted pregnancies in young women under 19, the consolidation during preadolescence and adolescence of attitudes, values, beliefs and habits that may influence the adoption of unsafe sex and the fact that the incorporation of the young in sex with more couples is becoming more and more frequent are some of the factors that endorse these figures.
In order to determine those wrong ideas and which are the conducts and attitudes that increase contagion risk among the young, a research team of the Universidad de Granada has assessed in 657 adolescents (491 of them without disorders, and the rest with minor psychological disorders) their knowledge of the disease, the susceptibility of HIV infection, their communication with their parents and friend on the subject and the execution of risk conducts.
The fact that the study includes adolescents with psychological problems responds to that “some previous studies showed that the presence of psychological disorders facilitated the increase of risk conduct emission”, according to professor María de la Paz Bermúdez, one of the researchers of the project.
Several Andalusian centres of secondary education were selected to carry out the analysis with adolescents without psychological disorders and they passed a complete questionnaire to the adolescents to assess their knowledge and conducts against AIDS and contagion. A very complicate work, as some educational centres “were prejudiced when it came to give their students a survey that included questions about safe sex”, the researcher explains.
As regards the wrong idea detected in the surveys of the group of teenagers without psychological disorders, there is a strong belief that the AIDS can be caused by the same virus that provokes other venereal diseases. 33% of the young polled thinks so, whereas 54.4% does not know it. 50.9% of those polled considers that all the infected persons by the AIDS virus fall ill and 22.8% does not know it. 27.3 % thinks that the AIDS is a disease caused by a bacterium, and 34.4% can not determine if it is a virus or a bacterium. 32.8% does not know if this disease can be curd if treated in time, while a high number, 39.9% of those polled, does not know if there is a medical treatment to prevent the transmission of the virus.
These results vary on the basis of if the adolescent suffers or not from psychological disorders. Adolescents without disorders have less wrong ideas and are more aware of the possibility of getting infected. As regards those attitudes, the young without disorders present less positive attitudes towards the use of preservatives that those suffer them.
Women with less risks
Sex also affects the results, in such a way that in the case of adolescents who do not present any kind of disorder, the responsible for the study have observed that women have more knowledge, less wrong ideas, less self-efficiency perception in the use of the preservative, less negative attitudes and more susceptibility to infection than men. As regards those who suffer from a minor disorder, women are more susceptible and present less negative attitudes than men.
In order to prevent that adolescents become the main target for AIDS, professor Bermúdez points out the importance of designing prevention programmes to deal with all the psychosocial factors which have been identified as “risks” for the Spanish population. We also must increase the susceptibility to infection, as adolescents do not know other young people of their age who have been infected with this disease. Training abilities to negotiate the use of preservatives, the communication with the parents and in the social ambit or the participation of the adolescents in social organizations, are other proposals which can help Spain to stop being one of the countries with a higher AIDS incidence in Western Europe, according to 2005 reports of UNAIDS and the World Health Organization.
Reference
Professor María de la Paz Bermúdez Sanchez. Dpt. Evolutionary and Education Psychology
Phone number. 958 243 750 / 958 243 968.
E-mail. maripaz@ugr.es
