Filed under: HIV, sexual health | Tags: education, Prevention, sexual health, STD, STI
Study Reveals Many Infections Undetected by Current Protocol
| Within the past four years, physicians and researchers in U.S. cities with have noticed a marked increase in certain sexually-transmitted diseases, like syphilis and gonorrhea, among gay men. A recent study by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicates a two-headed problem in preventing the spread of STDs among the gay population:
1) fewer gay men are going in for testing, 2) the tests to detect the presence of STDs do not always find the infections. In the twenty-five years since the AIDS crisis began, the gay male population in the U.S. has been the target of aggressive public-health and STD-prevention campaigns. By most accounts, these efforts have been successful in drastically decreasing the number of new HIV diagnoses among gay white men and fostering patients’ sense of responsibility for their own health. Since approximately 2004, however, doctors and journalists in the gay press have noticed a backlash against the stringent rules of safer sex, especially among young gay white men—the very population that enjoyed enormous reductions in new infections in the past decade. Article taken from here |
Filed under: HIV, sexual health | Tags: HIV, Prevention, sexual health, STD, STI, syphilis
San Francisco experienced a sharp rise in early syphilis between 1999 and 2002, with the number of cases rising from 44 to 494 per year. Rates continued to rise through 2004. Since 1999, most syphilis cases have been among men who identified as gay or bisexual (88%), were white (60%), and were infected with HIV (61%) . In June 2002, the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH), STD Prevention and Control Services launched a social marketing campaign, called Healthy Penis, designed to increase syphilis testing and awareness among gay and bisexual men.
In 1986, the British Government mounted an HIV/AIDS poster and leaflet campaign with the slogan “Don’t Aid AIDS”. This changed into the theme of “Don’t die of ignorance” over the course of the next year. This poster fits in between the two campaigns. It does mirror the television advert by using an image of the word AIDS on a tombstone.
