“Men initially try to treat the HIV themselves. This is what we believe to be the case. And so they maybe go to pharmacies and they buy some aspirin or some Tylenol and they don’t want to accept that they they’ve got HIV. And so we’re doing a very bad job of educating men about HIV (being) a chronic disease that you’re going to die from if you don’t access care at the right time. And you can’t treat it yourself. Traditional medicines aren’t going to work, nor is buying cheap medicines at a pharmacy going to work,” he said.

Raising awareness

Mills said a new approach is needed to encourage African men to get treatment for HIV. He says possibly a major campaign by UNAIDS may be needed to jump start efforts.

“It’s possible that with the increase in male circumcision that’s going on that’s happening for young males, in their adolescents or early 20s, that that could be an opportunity to test them and counsel them and try to engage them in care. But to be honest I think we need to take this at a much larger scale; and we need to start implementing public health campaigns that are aimed at targeting men’s behavior around accessing health care,” he said.

Current HIV/AIDS campaigns for men are different than those for women.

“So, if you’re in Africa at the moment you will see public health campaigns aimed at men telling them to reduce the number of sexual partners that they’ve got. But it’s all about stopping certain activities. It’s not about implementing access to health care. And that’s probably where we need to go because you do see that for females a lot of the time. They’ll have campaigns on the roadside with big posters up saying if you’re pregnant to make sure you get an HIV test so you save your baby,” he said.