Hideyo's Week 4 Discussion

I appreciate the educational direction you've taken your research this week. The AIDS Info .pdf looks awesome and I agree that we can mine that work for lots of information. I was also struck with the AIDS walk story. A couple exchanges stood out:

1. I found this exchange to be very telling about AIDS in the US:

T: When it comes to HIV/AIDS awareness, there is a general feeling among members of the population that HIV/AIDS is no longer a serious concern. However, the statistics available today prove that HIV/AIDS is on the rise both in this country and across the world. Why is there a relaxed attitude towards the disease considering that the converse is true?

RR: The reality is that treatments [such as AZT] are available and are helping individuals to live longer, healthier lives, but it is also true that more and more individuals are living with HIV every year. Nearly 30,000 people in the Philadelphia region are living with it and unfortunately a third of them don't even know it. As a result, those people are not even accessing the treatments that are available and in the Philadelphia area, many people don't learn their HIV status until they are ill.

It is interesting that the US is once again entering into an education crisis concerning HIV/AIDS. I realize my bias is that the developing nations need education about the disease more than developed nations. But the discussion above shows that we in the US are becoming more lax about educating ourselves.


2. I thought this discussion about abstinence education was also important:

T: Why has abstinence become the "one size fits all" approach to the HIV/AIDS issue?

RR: First and foremost, abstinence does work and it is 100 percent effective. But what it doesn't do is acknowledge the reality of most peoples' lives. Certainly, abstinence education does need to be part of the message we are trying to send, but it probably isn't the only thing that is going to work. Public health policy really needs to meet people where they are and that is a big difficultly when it comes to programs that are strictly abstinence-based.

As you look at how AIDS education is handled, I think you'll be entering into the debate concerning abstinence only vs. harm reduction policies. Many churches favor abstinence education almost to the exclusion of harm reduction. Do you think this is correct? How should the church handle the issue of education. It is one thing to say that we should help those already with the disease, but how do we educate our members and those in our communities to ensure that they don't contract the disease in the first place?