I was talking to Ams today about how the media here portrays AIDS as the worst disease in the world. I believe the reason why awareness of AIDS and HIV is being promoted so much in America is simply because that’s the most common and potentially fatal disease here. You see so many ad campaigns raising AIDS/HIV awareness. With slogans like, “Let’s talk about it,” and so many celebrities making such a big deal about AIDS, it’s hard to not notice it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we shouldn’t fund research for a cure for AIDS, but should it really be out number one priority?
You heard celebrities and organizations asking for people’s donations to help third world countries with the problem of AIDS. But when was the last time you heard people talk about Tuberculosis (TB)? TB causes nearly 2 million deaths a year according to WHO, and about 1 billion people are estimated to be infected with TB between 2000 and 2020. We already have a cure for TB, people in the third world just can’t afford them. And yet you don’t hear people talking about raising the awareness of TB do you? If anyone truly wants to help those in the third world, they take a step back and see that people in the third world are dying from many other diseases (not just AIDS) that we already have cures for. If only some of that money going in to AIDS research were used to provide treatments for other diseases, think about how many people that would save.
The only reason people here are making such a big deal about AIDS/HIV is because we want the cure. Let’s face it, even if we find a cure for AIDS, it isn’t going to help the people in the third world. AIDS will still a problem there, just like how TB and leprosy are still problems there.
How many times have you heard the term “safe sex”? If only people were educated about safe sex we wouldn’t have such a big problem with AIDS right? Wrong! There is no such thing as safe sex. It should be more correctly termed as safer sex. Condoms do not protect you 100%. There is always the chance that condoms might break, or maybe they were defects. Or maybe the condom wasn’t taken off properly and the partner ends up being exposed to the semen anyway. The point is that there is always that chance you will contract an STD. Statistically, you can lower the chance of contracting an STD from someone by using a condom. However, if so many people are sleeping around you can also increase the expected number of STD contractions (even though the probability of contraction is low).
Let’s say that in one instance you have a probability of 1 of contracting STD (since no one uses a condom), and you have about 100 cases of people with STD having sex with someone who doesn’t over a course of 1 month. Then there would be 100 STD contractions for that period of 1 month. Now, you introduce condoms, and they lower the probability of contraction to 0.05, but the number of people with STD having sex with someone who doesn’t increases to 2000. Then the expected number of contractions is 100, just as in the first case.
By promoting “safe sex” you are only feeding people lies that can seriously hurt them. The more people think they can have sex and be immune to STDs, the more people will want to have sex. The only true way to AIDS prevention is to not sleep around so much. Of course, that would just be ridiculous right?
