From the Director:
Happy New Year!
To start off 2025, I wanted to highlight Molly Franke’s research and campaign to mitigate HIV-related stigma in Peru.
Despite tremendous advances in HIV treatment and prevention, gaps in HIV service delivery continue to exist in many parts of the world, and HIV-related stigma remains an important barrier to reducing these gaps.
In Latin America, in addition to high levels of stigma toward and among people living with HIV (PLWH), there is generalized stigma toward the populations in which HIV is most prevalent: gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men, transgender women, and sex workers.
This stigma threatens the advances in access to HIV treatment, as it contributes to treatment non-adherence, lack of HIV disclosure to sexual partners, and condomless sexual intercourse. Therefore, mitigating stigma is essential to improving the health of PLWH and the general population.
Core faculty member Molly Franke, an infectious disease epidemiologist, received funding from NIH to develop a social media campaign aimed at reducing HIV-related stigma in Peru. Her team conducted focus groups and interviews with young people living with HIV, healthcare providers, and HIV advocates in Lima to identify critical messages to convey and collaborated with a Peruvian content creation agency to bring these messages to life.
The campaign, nicknamed DiME or “tell me” in Spanish, features original videos filmed around Lima that dispel common myths about HIV, things like “you can get HIV if you share utensils or drink out of the same cup” or “HIV is a certain death sentence”, and videos that promote empathy and inclusion of PLWH in all aspects of society.
They also joined forces with a local influencer agency to recruit prominent Peruvian social media influencers to participate in the campaign by creating content about HIV for their followers. In just four months, the DiME Instagram and TikTok accounts have garnered a combined 11,900 followers and over a million content visualizations.
Dr. Franke and the DiME team will evaluate whether exposure to campaign content reduces stigma for young people living with and without HIV. However, direct messages to the DiME accounts provide early evidence that content is having a positive impact, as one adolescent wrote…
“Hi, I’m 17 and your videos are helping me a lot to keep going. Thanks for everything. It’s painful, I never thought I would have this, but with your advice I’m doing really well.”
The team hopes that findings from this study regarding effectiveness and feasibility will encourage others to harness the power of social media to address stigma related to HIV and other infectious diseases.
Follow along at @dime.peru on Instagram and TikTok!
