Okunoye Babatunde, Ning Shaoyang, Jemielniak Dariusz
Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States.
Department of Journalism, Film and Television, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa.
JMIR Form Res. 2022 Mar 11;6(3):e29819. doi: 10.2196/29819.
AIDS, caused by HIV, is a leading cause of mortality in Africa. HIV/AIDS is among the greatest public health challenges confronting health authorities, with South Africa having the greatest prevalence of the disease in the world. There is little research into how Africans meet their health information needs on HIV/AIDS online, and this research gap impacts programming and educational responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
This paper reports on how, in general, interest in the search terms "HIV" and "AIDS" mirrors the increase in people living with HIV and the decline in AIDS cases in South Africa.
Data on search trends for HIV and AIDS for South Africa were found using the search terms "HIV" and "AIDS" (categories: health, web search) on Google Trends. This was compared with data on estimated adults and children living with HIV, and AIDS-related deaths in South Africa, from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, and also with search interest in the topics "HIV" and "AIDS" on Wikipedia Afrikaans, the most developed local language Wikipedia service in South Africa. Nonparametric statistical tests were conducted to support the trends and associations identified in the data.
Google Trends shows a statistically significant decline (P<.001) in search interest for AIDS relative to HIV in South Africa. This trend mirrors progress on the ground in South Africa and is significantly associated (P<.001) with a decline in AIDS-related deaths and people living longer with HIV. This trend was also replicated on Wikipedia Afrikaans, where there was a greater interest in HIV than AIDS.
This statistically significant (P<.001) association between interest in the search terms "HIV" and "AIDS" in South Africa (2004-2019) and the number of people living with HIV and AIDS in the country (2004-2019) might be an indicator that multilateral efforts at combating HIV/AIDS-particularly through awareness raising and behavioral interventions in South Africa-are bearing fruit, and this is not only evident on the ground, but is also reflected in the online information seeking on the HIV/AIDS pandemic. We acknowledge the limitation that in studying the association between Google search interests on HIV/AIDS and cases/deaths, causal relationships should not be drawn due to the limitations of the data.
由人类免疫缺陷病毒（HIV）引起的艾滋病是非洲主要的死亡原因之一。HIV/艾滋病是卫生当局面临的最大公共卫生挑战之一，南非是全球该疾病患病率最高的国家。关于非洲人如何通过网络满足其对HIV/艾滋病健康信息需求的研究很少，这一研究空白影响了针对HIV/艾滋病大流行的规划和教育应对措施。
本文报告了一般情况下，搜索词“HIV”和“AIDS”的搜索热度如何反映南非HIV感染者数量的增加以及艾滋病病例的减少。
通过在谷歌趋势上使用搜索词“HIV”和“AIDS”（类别：健康、网络搜索）来获取南非HIV和艾滋病的搜索趋势数据。将其与联合国艾滋病规划署提供的南非估计的HIV成年和儿童感染者数据以及与艾滋病相关的死亡数据进行比较，还与南非最发达的当地语言维基百科服务——阿非利卡语维基百科上关于“HIV”和“AIDS”主题的搜索兴趣进行比较。进行非参数统计检验以支持数据中确定的趋势和关联。
谷歌趋势显示，在南非，与HIV相比，对艾滋病的搜索兴趣在统计学上有显著下降（P<.001）。这一趋势反映了南非当地的进展情况，并且与艾滋病相关死亡人数的减少以及HIV感染者寿命的延长显著相关（P<.001）。这一趋势在阿非利卡语维基百科上也有体现，在该平台上对HIV的兴趣高于对艾滋病的兴趣。
2004 - 2019年南非搜索词“HIV”和“AIDS”的搜索兴趣与该国2004 - 2019年的HIV和艾滋病感染者数量之间存在统计学显著关联（P<.001），这可能表明抗击HIV/艾滋病的多边努力——特别是通过在南非开展提高认识和行为干预措施——正在取得成效，这不仅在实际情况中明显体现，也反映在关于HIV/艾滋病大流行的在线信息搜索中。我们承认存在局限性，即在研究谷歌对HIV/艾滋病的搜索兴趣与病例/死亡之间的关联时，由于数据的局限性，不应得出因果关系。
