04/02/2026
The Cost of Stigma: Not Being Able to Access HIV Care and Testing in Your Own Community. Individuals in rural and northern areas face barriers to accessing STBBI testing and treatment, leading to rising HIV transmission rates.
[What is The Cost of Stigma?
Created by the HIV Lived Experience Advisory as a tandem campaign to A Taste for Life, The Cost of Stigma highlights how stigma functions as a cyclical health care crisis. While conversations about health care often focus on financial costs, this campaign brings attention to the deeper social cost of stigma and the ways it impacts people living with HIV.
At the center of the campaign is the imagery of the Ouroboros Effect, the image of a snake eating its own tail. This symbol reflects how stigma perpetuates itself: fear, misinformation, and discrimination create barriers to care and understanding, which in turn reinforce the very stigma that caused those barriers. The result is a continuous cycle where, if nothing changes,
nothing changes.
The Cost of Stigma is designed as a simple yet eye-catching awareness campaign that will appear as both virtual and physical posters. Its goal is to spark conversation about stigma as a social health concern and one that affects access to care, community wellbeing, and the lives of people living with HIV.]
