AVAILABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY AS INFLUENCING FACTORS OF HIV/AIDS INFORMATION UTILIZATION AMONG WOMEN
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
All the human activities that result in problem solving and the production of goods and services depend on the availability, accessibility and utilization of information to effect communication. Communication in this context, is the sharing of information by human beings. The process can be carried out in different ways and through different media of communication.
    In this era of HIV/AIDS, community members are involved in complex behaviour to solving the problems posed by the presence of HIV/AIDS, as noted by Donohue and Kochen ( 1973 ), concerning the complex social setting.
    In the current setting of HIV/AIDS pandemic, the everyday information needs of the average community member in the remotest village of our local government areas, has become a very critical issue. However, sad enough, as noted by Dervin ( 1976 ) as quoted by Okwilagwe (1993).
      The first cases of HIV/AIDS in the world were identified in the United States of America among a group of homosexuals (Rosenberg , 1992) and WHO (1999) noted that about 50 million people worldwide were living with the virus; 90 percent were in developing countries with a sizeable proportion of them being children and women.
 In Nigeria, HIV/AIDS was identified in 1986 (Okafor, 1996), and the prevalence rate rose steadily to a peak of 5.8 percent by 2002. The prevalence rate reduced in 2003, putting the country at 5.0 percent as reported in the Nigerian National Sentinel prevalence study of 2003 by ( Uneze, 2005 ).
