Mackenzie Perkins
HIV/AIDS
HIV and AIDS are most prevalent in poor African Americans as well as in Latinos. Social workers, law enforcement and other service workers seem to be always telling them what to do and when public health officials start telling them what to change in their private sex life to prevent HIV/AIDS it is obvious why their messages for safer sex get ignored. One of the reasons for the distrust of public health officials stems from the legacy of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study where black men with syphilis were intentionally given inadequate treatment and followed for 40 years in order to see the effects of untreated syphilis. They were never informed that they were not receiving treatment.
Rewinding to the draft for the Vietnam War, many people were scared because the war was very dangerous and there was a high likelihood that they would die. People who did not want to go to war started saying no, and at first this was frowned upon and they were criticized for being cowards, but eventually tens of thousands of college students also started saying no to the draft. This started/gave people a sense of freedom and started an odd cultural break that lead us away from our “up tight” society. 1969 was known as the summer of love where people started to say ‘screw you’ I’ll just listen to rock n roll, do drugs and have a lot of sex. Watergate was the last moment when society lost faith in the system. There was a cultural revolution to have sex with whomever you wanted and there was no worry because birth control was readily available at that time, as well as abortions. Nobody in the 70s really cared about AIDS because it was thought to just be a disease affecting gay men.
Today we still do not have a cure for HIV or AIDS but there is medicine that you can take daily that has been shown to slow down the spread of symptoms and can prolong life. 1 out of 7 people infected with HIV do not even know that they have it. When someone knows that they have HIV/AIDS they are not allowed to have unprotected sex without informing their partner about their disease, and if they do it is a felony. Many people avoid getting checked because they think that if they have it, they will never get laid again.