Gay Immigrants Are At Risk Of HIV Transmission Due To Stigma

Men from the LGBT communities like gays, bisexual men wish to move to the better place where people have much more tolerance, where they won’t be discriminated only because of their sexual habits. A study, based on the data on the information collected by the European MSM Internet Survey, that in fact gay and bisexual migrants face stigma and discrimination and these adverse conditions bring them to the high risk of HIV transmission.

The complications and difficulties gay and bisexual migrants face are still the same: bad coverage of HIV prevention and treatment services, lack of knowledge of the most important ways of HIV transmission, criminalization and so on. All the findings of researchers from the Yale School of Public Health were published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.

MSM migrants are potentially affected by stigmas directed toward sexual minorities and toward immigrants. Yet, previous research has only examined these stigma influences in isolation. We looked at the LGBT stigma in a person’s previous country and in their current country and found that both are relevant to MSM migrants’ HIV risk. We found that LGBT stigma in one’s current country had the strongest effects on HIV-risk outcomes, although having previously lived in a country with a supportive climate seemed to protect against some of those risks upon migrating,- said John E. Pachankis, Ph.D., associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health.