A friend of mine says he and his 6th grade son were watching something on TV which mentioned about homosexuality and AIDS. The boy has had either a health class or basic sex education talks in school. While he understood about homosexuality, he did not understand the connection to AIDS!
Isn’t this a little disturbing? I feel they should be presented with all the facts including all causes of its spread, etc. I don’t know why they would omit information about the connection between the two…and what else have the omitted?
Are you equally disturbed by this news? It’s kinda like teaching someone about guns without ever mentioning facts about the bullets.
While a HISTORY of AIDS should absolutely include mention of the inital emergence among the gay population, that is irrelevant to a facts-and-prevention oriented course. The disease itself does not care if its host is gay or straight; all humans are at risk if they engage in risky behavior. Unprotected sex, whether among same-sex or opposite sex couples, is risky behavior.
I agree with Bricker. In the US, AIDS appears to be a “gay disease”, but it’s dangerous to your health to think that way. In Africa, where some areas have up to a 40% infection rate with HIV, this is a disease of heterosexuals, and of many children born to infected mothers.
There are less safe or unsafe sex acts, which do involve things like anal sex, which many people think is a “homosexual behavior.” However, not all gay men participate in anal sex often (and some not at all), and oral sex/mutual masturbation is much safer than that - the latter is pretty much considered a “safe sex” act. Many heterosexual people experiment with anal sex, which has a higher transmission rate than vaginal sex (but the latter is still not a “safe” behavior). Meanwhile, lesbians fall into the “homosexual” category, but typically they (last I heard) have the lowest infection rate - assuming they aren’t IV drug users.
HIV is transmitted via behaviors, not via the gender of the people involved. It is transmitted best by blood (sharing needles, tearing of mucus membranes during sex, menstrual blood, untested donated blood) or semen. That is what kids taking sex ed need to know. You have zero idea what a new sex partner’s past might have been - was that person engaging in higher risk sexual acts? How about past partners of that person? If your new partner didn’t know that a previous partner was screwing around on the side, he or she might be infected with HIV and not even know it, honestly stating that “Oh, I just got out of a long-term relationship, it just didn’t work out. We were exclusive, there’s no need to worry about condoms…”
If the youngster wasn’t taught that anal sex and IV drug taking are particularly high risk behaviour with respect to catching HIV then I would agree that his education was lacking. But hetero sexual couples are just as capable of engaging in Anal sex, and the only people who cannot engage in (risky) anal sex (AFAIK) are homosexual female couples.
Does anyone have a site for the HIV danger of heterosexual sex with a mensturating woman? If the male is HIV positive, and also if the female is HIV positive. Is HIV transfer more likely in this case than if the same people engaged in anal sex?
So the first quote addresses the issue of it not being a “homosexual disease” overall, and the second would suggest that HIV is present in significant levels in menstrual blood.
Here’s one “numbers comparison”, but the numbers aren’t clear cut. It looks like one episode of unprotected receptive anal sex with a HIV-positive partner could be a risk of anywhere from 1 in 3,333 to 1 in 50. One episode of vaginal sex with an infected female is about 1 in 200,000 chance, while one episode with an infected male is about 1 in 100,000.
At any rate - yes, the rates are low. However, this is certainly not a non-zero chance of infection. From the first link I posted:
So women are obviously narrowing the “gap” of infection rate here in the US (one might assume they would have had a higher rate earlier if this jump was only due to IV drug usage), and the worldwide rate of infection through vaginal intercourse is 80%.
Plus HIV can have a very long incubation period, and even people with AIDS can look quite healthy. So hopefully the sex ed class that the child in the OP took addressed at an age-appropriate level issues like “risky behavior” of any kind regarding contracting HIV (sharing needles, unprotected sex acts, what body fluids HIV is most prevalent in), use of a barrier form of contraception/STD prevention (don’t rely on spermacide applied separately, oral contraceptives, IUDs, or other means of delivering hormones - shot, patch, implant), and not relying on apparent health/outward appearance as any guarantee that the person does not have HIV or any other STD. The curriculum was correct in not emphasizing the “connection” between homosexuality and AIDS. For most of the world, there is none, and in the US, heterosexuals are the most prevalent of the newly infected in most situations.
Are you kidding? Anal sex among homosexual males carries only an indeterminate degree of risk. If I tried that business on my wife, the results would certainly be fatal. For me, I mean.
Maybe you should get her the “Bend over Boyfriend” book so she can do the deed to you
Seriously, wouldn’t sexual penetration of a woman during her period have a much higher chance of passing aids from one partner to the other than anal sex? After all therr is definately going to be blood involved in the former.
Not necessarily. Yes, there’s been quite an upswing in the percentage of AIDS patients who are female between 1986 and 2003. But that doesn’t mean women are increasing their infection rates overall. After all, HIV infection doesn’t equal AIDS. AIDS is HIV plus one of the CDC’s indicator diseases. All your numbers mean is that women weren’t getting the indicator diseases as often in 1986. They don’t say anything about the percentage of HIV patients, just AIDS patients. The percentage of female AIDS patients jumped quite a bit in 1993, the year the CDC added cervical cancer to the list of indicator diseases. And they’ve been throwing that “nearly half of all new HIV infections” thing around since at least then.
Statistically, that’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect to see, though. If women are roughly half the population, and men and women engage in their respective risk behaviors at comparable rates, then roughly half the new infections should be in women. And if you make a disease that only affects women part of the definition of another disease, then the percentage of women diagnosed with the second disease should rise. That’s just basic common sense.
Addressing the OP - I’d have to say that you have consider the “school factor”, that is the added liklihood that the information was given, but the kid didn’t pick it up. There would be both less boredom and less distraction (presense of other kids) when sitting and watching TV, even if it IS the news.
