An assessment of global Internet-based HIV/AIDS media coverage: implications for United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS' Global Media HIV/AIDS initiative

Abstract

No studies to date have assessed the quantity of HIV/AIDS-related media on the Internet. We assessed the quantity of language-specific HIV/AIDS Internet-based news coverage, and the correlation between country-specific HIV/AIDS news coverage and HIV/AIDS prevalence. Internet-based HIV/AIDS news articles were queried from Google News Archives for 168 countries, for the year 2007, in the nine most commonly spoken languages worldwide. English, French and Spanish sources had the greatest number of HIV/AIDS-related articles, representing 134,000 (0.70%), 11,200 (0.65%) and 24,300 (0.49%) of all news articles, respectively. A strong association between country-specific HIV/AIDS news coverage and HIV/AIDS prevalence was found, Spearman's rank correlation: 0.6 (P < 0.001). Among countries with elevated HIV/AIDS prevalence (> or =10%), the volume of HIV/AIDS-specific media was highest in Swaziland (15.9%) and Malawi (13.2%), and lowest in South Africa (4.8%) and Namibia (4.9%). Increased media attention should be placed on countries with high HIV/AIDS prevalence and limited HIV/AIDS-specific news coverage.