Hamdi Sfaxi, who sells prayer rugs outside his local mosque in Tunis, has heard it all before. “If you’re going to treat Aids,” he says “you need to know where it came from. It didn’t exist in the past. The first person to get Aids was a gay man who had sex with a monkey.”
Sfaxi is not alone in his opinions. As the international Aids conference begins in Melbourne this week, Tunisia, a country with one of the most far-reaching and comprehensive approaches to combating HIV-Aids in the Middle East and north Africa, is in a war of attrition with the pervasive influences of ignorance and stigma that cut through to the marrow of Tunisian society.
While infection rates among its 10.8 million people remain relatively low – UNAids estimated the figure at 2,300 in 2012 – the numbers have reached much higher levels among certain groups…
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