On this World AIDS Day, several actors wish to raise awareness among the population and believe that in 2022, many prejudices still exist around this disease.
Michel Charron, who has been living with HIV since 1987, recalls that an AIDS diagnosis at the time was very difficult.
“People were scared,” he says.
Although the number of new people infected each year has been falling in recent years, HIV continues to affect thousands of people in Quebec.
“HIV is linked to groups that are already stigmatised. It just reinforces those stigmas. There is also the fear of contracting HIV, which is still there because people lack information,” explains Nathalie Cloutier, worker at the Regional AIDS Action Office in Gatineau.
Unlike the 1980s, a diagnosis of HIV is no longer a death sentence.
Today, many treatments exist to make the disease undetectable in the blood.
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