The developed world is rapidly losing interest in the world’s HIV epidemic, according to an analysis by British researchers published today.
Successful drug treatments and the spread of the virus in developing nations has shifted focus away from the disease, according to the new analysis published in advance of World Aids Day tomorrow.
Researchers in Leeds and Belfast – working with centres in Berlin, Germany, and Marseilles, France – have found that newspaper coverage of the disease has fallen by two thirds in 20 years.
The findings are part of a project of public perception of sustainability issues. Researchers find "climate change" grabbing all the headlines at the expense of other sustainability issues.
They have analysed as many as 69 million newspaper articles in 410,000 broadsheet newspapers across the developed world.
Researcher Professor Frank Figge from Queen’s University Management School, Belfast, UK, said: "HIV/AIDS has emerged as a key issue that increasingly tends to be treated with neglect by newspapers based in the developed North.
"This does not necessarily come as a surprise, as the remarkable progress that has been made in tackling HIV/AIDS has also largely been restricted to the wealthy North.
"Hence, the problem itself has shifted towards the global South.”
And Dr Ralf Barkemeyer, from the University of Leeds, said: "In recent years, climate change has emerged as a defining issue in the context of sustainability.
"This globally-important issue has been very successful in terms of gaining general public acceptance of and attention to sustainability, but at the same time it may have significantly changed the sustainability agenda itself – possibly at the expense of attention to socioeconomic problems such as malaria and HIV/AIDS or even corruption, human rights or poverty.
"All of these issues have seen a stark decline in media coverage in recent years, in particular since early 2006 when media attention devoted to climate change started to pick up markedly."
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