RESEARCH ARTICLE
Awareness and Attitudes About HIV Among Pregnant Women in Aksu, Northwest China
Rena Maimaiti1, Rune Andersson*, 2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2008Volume: 2
First Page: 72
Last Page: 77
Publisher ID: TOAIDJ-2-72
DOI: 10.2174/1874613600802010072
Article History:
Received Date: 11/3/2008Revision Received Date: 20/6/2008
Acceptance Date: 19/8/2008
Collection year: 2008
Electronic publication date: 25/9/2008

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has a firmly established HIV epidemic among its intravenous drug user (IDU) population. Local sex workers were also found to be positive in 1998. A descriptive, cross-sectional survey of knowledge about HIV/AIDS and attitudes among consecutively selected pregnant women was conducted November 2005 in Aksu Prefecture, north-western China, with a population on 2 million with about 25 000 pregnancies per year. A total of 291 pregnant women participated. We found a limited knowledge on mother-to child transmission with several misconceptions. The AIDS campaigns have been successful in making all the women aware of HIV as a sexually transmitted disease. However, the common belief that social contact causes transmission gives a high risk that patients are stigmatized. Obviously, it is important to design HIV information strategies that target pregnant women in north-western China.