Monday 1 December 2008

World Aids Day: Still There is Ignorance

To mark the 20th World AIDS Day much of the media has been running stories over the weekend and today. However, in Friday's times next to the tales of four people living with HIV/AIDS there was also a startling reminder that there is a lot of ignorance still out there.

Those of us who lived through the 1980's early campaign Don't Die of Ignorance will definitely be shocked at the amount of ignorance that the article threw up.

Amongst some of the startling levels of ignorance were:

"One person in three living with HIV in the UK doesn't know that he or she
is infected, putting their health and that of their sexual partners at risk.
Undiagnosed HIV is responsible for about half of all new infections.

"For many people the diagnosis is too late for them to start treatment. The
virus is more likely to be diagnosed late in heterosexual men (42 per cent) and
women (36 per cent) than in gay or bisexual men (19 per cent). A late diagnosis
is 13 times more likely to lead to death within a year.

"In a recent survey, only 79 per cent of respondents knew that HIV can be
transmitted through unprotected sex between a man and a woman, compared with 91 per cent in 2000."

Sadly after 20 years it is still ignorance that leads to more unnecessary deaths in the UK, but sadly the level of ignorance appears to be growing again.

3 comments:

  1. Indeed & the biggest source of ignorance is that, after 20 years of what we are assured would be a geometric spread of the disease, until a cure was found, so that it would be one of Britain's biggest killers by about 10 years ago, the powers that be still refuse to run Stephen Duesberg's test to see if AIDS actually is caused by HIV.

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  2. Neil surely you mean Peter Duesberg some of who's already disproved claims about HIV/AIDS were that is was caused by long-term consumption of recreational drugs and/or antiretroviral drugs.

    He has also claimed that the African AIDS situation is down to malnutrition, bad drinking water, and various infections dispite imperical proof from case studies that this is far from the common denominator, especially in
    South Africa. He is therefore the champion of President Mbeki who therefore refused to provide antiretroviral drugs such as AZT to his citizens leading to one of the major AIDS epidemics in the world.

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  3. Thats the guy.

    Exactly how have his theories been "disproved"? A difficult enough task in science at the best of times but made infinitely more difficult by refusing to do the tests.

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