Attitudes Towards AIDS Among Pharmacy Students

The goals of the present research were to assess the attitudes toward AIDS of a large sample of pharmacy students, to identify demographic and attitudinal variables within the pharmacy sample associated with positive and negative AIDS attitudes, and to compare the attitudes of pharmacy students to those of medical and nursing students. To accomplish this, 636 students at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Sciences filled out the AIDS Attitude Scale and supplied other personal information. Among the pharmacy students, several factors were found to be associated with AIDS attitudes, however homonegativism was most strongly related. These findings were interpreted to suggest that further AIDS education among pharmacy students is necessary, and that such courses or programs should help students to feel more comfortable interacting with stigmatized groups. While the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) “pandemic ” is of international proportion and concern, the Americas have been particularly hard hit, with about three-quarters of reported cases(1,2). In the U.S., AIDS repre-sents the first terminal infectious disease to reach such epidemic proportions within most people’s lifetime. Thi