So this week we had to interview a couple of our friends, family members etc. and ask them a couple of questions regarding HIV. I found this exercise to be very eye opening. Some of the answers that I got from my friends were alarming. A lot of them told me that they would look at me differently if I got HIV and that they would be more cautious around me. That hurt me because I know from personal experience that when you get sick that's when you need people to be there for you, and you don't want them to treat you differently. For example I have a plastic anemia and I know that when I first got sick people didnt know how to act around me and they would treat me differently. In addition when I would be in and out of the hospital people weren't really there and it hurts because when you are in those positions you are vulnerable and you want people to be there even if its just chit chat, any type of human contact is appreciated. This exercise also helped open my eyes to the un-awareness that there is when it comes to HIV and AIDS. It is a known fact in the US the south is high in numbers when it comes to people with HIV and AIDS. During one of the interviews my roommate Sandra brought to my attention that for example in miami where we come from its more of a cultural thing. In the spanish culture as well as the roman catholic church (which most spanish people are) they dont believe in condoms, and so they dont teach their children about using condoms. In the african american community they dont talk about HIV either. Most young girls think the worst thing that can happen to you when having sex without a condom is getting pregnant. When in reality there is so much more to that. I remember being being in highschool and I was fortunate to go to a highschool where they stressed sexual education, but a lot of the neighboring schools didnt have the same resources, and for most students sex ed was just you talking about STI's and getting pregnant and how we should be abstinant. The HIV section was a section in a chapter for most people. This made me think about my dad and how he is an AIDS counselor up in New York and how the State of New York does a lot more to raise awareness. They pass out condoms all over the place and offer information and do presentations. I think that more states should do things like that to promote safer sex.
Did you know: Sperm Washing!
A couple of blogs ago I talked about how if a male has HIV and his partner doesnt they can still have children that are HIV negative. This is done by sperm washing. HIV is found in seminal fluid not the semen itself. So what they do is they seperate the sperm from the seminal fluid and then use the concentrated sperm and inject it into the egg.
Cite:
Mark Cichocki, R.N., (2007, July 25). Sperm Washing-Hope For Serodiscordant Couples Wanting a Family. Retrieved from aids.about.com
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ReplyDeleteWe have a religious problem in the south that you don't find so much in the northern states. New York has a very high incidence of HIV/AIDS in the state and so they must educate if the want those numbers to go down. Florida doesn't see a big problem, even though there is one, and so must counties have an abstinence approach. Seminole county would rather build day care centers on their high school campuses than teach the kids about how to prevent HIV with the use of condoms. We live in a crazy country.