The United Nations released a report on Monday stating that the number of people around the world living with HIV continues to rise past 40 million, its highest level ever. It asserted that 5 million people became newly infected during 2005 alone.
With the marked rise in prevention techniques and treatment availability, HIV rates were expected to decrease. In contrast, the AIDS epidemic is rapidly increasing all over the world.
Of the more than 3 million people who died of AIDS in 2005, 500,000 were children. The highest increases in HIV infection are found in Africa with some countries having more than a third of its population living with the virus. Yet the United States, Canada and Europe all show increasing infection rates as well.
At a UN Headquarters press conference, Jim Kim, director of the World Health Organization HIV/AIDS Department, said that although they are not sure which intervention technique leads to a change in a person's behavior and reduction in HIV transmission, "any time you take one or the other out for ideological or political reasons, you are really putting a country and individuals at risk."
Kim was mainly referring to the use of condoms and the hesitancy of many countries to promote their use. The United States is one such country which has a tendency to blur Christianity with governance and endanger its population.
Scientific studies of sexually active couples, where one partner is infected with HIV and the other partner is not, have demonstrated that the consistent use of latex condoms reduces the likelihood of HIV infection by 80 percent to 90 percent. The use of condoms by sex workers and other individuals throughout the Caribbean, the second-highest infected region after Sub-Saharan Africa, is a major reason why it is the only region that managed to lower its HIV rates.
Despite all this information, we still see abstinence-only programs being taught all over the United States which do not promote the use of condoms, even for STD prevention.
Recently several Christian right groups, such as the Family Research Council which has considerable sway with the Republican Party, have condemned the HPV vaccine which prevents cervical cancer. This is because they are afraid it will promote sexual promiscuity and contradict their abstinence message.
This is just another way of saying that people who have cervical cancer deserve it. The same goes for HIV and any other sexually transmitted infections.
As Christian as this ridiculous message is, it ignores the more than 1 million people in this country infected with HIV and the increase of HIV infection rates with the increase of abstinence-only programs.
The Christian right represents itself as a 'culture of life' yet it continually condemns people to die through a promotion of ignorance in the face of overwhelming evidence that abstinence-only programs do not work and comprehensive sexual health education does not encourage promiscuity.
Because according to the Centers for Disease Control, approximately half of all HIV infections to date in the United States occur in people younger than 25, sexual health education should be of particular importance to students in college.
According to the CDC, 25 percent of the infected U.S. population do not know they have HIV. This is why testing is so important.
Thursday, Dec. 1 is World AIDS Day, and the University will be offering free HIV Antibody tests on campus at the SSB from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
America is one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world and many Americans feel that HIV infection is something reserved for less affluent nations. But we are just as vulnerable to the disease as the small children in Africa dying from it by the thousands.
Ryan is a radio-television-film and humanities senior.
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