After our discussion of HIV in Tuesdays class and Dr. Cohen's comment about the younger generations lack of HIV awareness I found an article that proves his point. Recently a high school in suburban Missouri had a HIV scare. Accourding to health officals 50 out of the 1300 student population were potentially exposed to HIV. One student came forward to health officals saying he had HIV and other students may have been exposed. Students may have been exposed through sexual activity, intravenous drug use, tattoos and piercings.
One has to wonder if this would have occured if awareness of risky behaviors and HIV tranmission was higher. As Dr. Cohen stated, it seems as though the younger generation has less knowledge about HIV then in the 90's. This article also shows how little the general population knows about HIV. For example, a rival football team was concerned about playing the high school where the exposures occured and many students want to transfer out of the district.
This article shows how important education about HIV and risky behaviors is still needed.
http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-national/20081024/High.School.HIV/
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
This is a very interesting topic. I think that people today are exposed a lot more to medicine and the different diseases out there, look at all the commercials there are for different drugs. Yet this information is not really complete, it is just a selling tactic that many doctors have to deal with daily as patients come in with a diagnoses already. I have even done this by using WebMed once before I went into the doctor to see what was wrong. Of course what I thought was much worse than what I had!
It is interesting that the public's knowledge of HIV has diminished from the 1990's. Yet in that time HIV and AIDS was in the news all the time and much more in the public light as the crisis it was, and it still is. I think that unfortunately a lot of the knowledge and awareness that people have about a disease depend on how well it is publicized in the news and by media figures. But that is how it is about most things.
I wonder if the school's reaction or their knowledge of the disease would be the same in a much larger city, instead of the small town of only 5,000 residents where this took place.
Post a Comment