Jeez Louise

World AIDS day was this past week. I know I didn’t blog about it on THE DAY, but I am now.

I grew up in a time when, at first, you didn’t know HOW you could get AIDS– Ryan White was kicked out of school, because people thought that if he looked at them, they’d be infected. Panic everywhere. At my Catholic school, the nuns were telling us to not drink out of the water fountains without wiping them off first, because “you never knew”. Eventually we learned the truth and, though people were still concerned about the disease, they knew what precautions should be taken. All through high school, you could ask any of my classmates how to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS and they would rattle off at least ten answers. We knew that no sex was safe sex, but that there were safer forms of sexual contact. We knew about condoms, dental dams (dental dams! Remember those?) mutual masturbation, etc. etc. etc. We all saw the horrible torment Dwayne The Bully went through on Degrassi, and how Joey became his only friend once everyone else found out. We watched Life Goes On, and halfway fell in love with Becca’s dying boyfriend. Hell, we even watched that TV movie with Molly Ringwald in it. We knew what was going on… or we thought we did.

It just seems as though, as progress was made in the prevention and treatment of AIDS, people started relaxing. Sure, maybe we don’t all need to go around with rubber gloves and masks on… but it’s as though people are forgetting that the disease is out there.

Where I live, even the thought of HIV/AIDS seems like a far-off distant possibility… you don’t know anyone with it, or at least, you don’t think you do. Working with teenagers, I realize that even though we have known about this killer for over 20 years, many kids today are just not well enough informed. According to CANFAR, nearly 50% of North American grade 9 students wrongly believe that there is a cure for AIDS, if it’s treated early enough. Worse than that, 20% of ADULTS believe the same thing. I teach in a junior high. I’ve taught in high school. Most of these kids think that oral sex isn’t really sex, and that you can’t catch anything unless you have full-on penetrative sex (and that wearing a condom will completely protect you from any STD 100% of the time).

I actually heard someone, an adult, say on TV the other day, “AIDS isn’t as big a problem as it used to be. Why are we still talking about it?”

Here’s why.

Every six seconds, someone in the world is infected with HIV.
40 million people are living with HIV /AIDS right now. Approximately 2.2 million of these are children, under the age of 15.
More than 50% of new HIV infections occur among adolescents and young adults below the age of 25.
25 million people have died of AIDS since the discovery of the disease;
3.1 million people died of AIDS-related complications in 2005 alone.
5 million people were infected with HIV in 2005.
25% of all people who are infected with HIV are completely unaware that they have it.

It’s not going away. There is no cure. We still need to do something.

Inspired by the lovely Karen’s post about World AIDS day, I am hoping to donate 1 shiny Canadian dollar to CANFAR for every comment left here between now and 11:59 pm (locally) Wednesday, Dec. 6th, 2006. Like Karen, I’d love to know where you’re from, so leave your name (make up a name, I don’t care), your city, your country. And go ahead, make me poor.