Recantation 1: mine
Posted on Apr 26 2006 | Tagged as: Yours truly, The Stupid, Media, Culture, Science
I was wrong. Quite, quite wrong.
I claimed that Aids-awareness adverts were completely barking up the wrong tree, that we didn’t need to hammer home how disease spreads, and that people are not ignorant but rather simply irresponsible.
But…
Colin Richardson writes:
There is still a great deal of ignorance about HIV in this country, after all these years. A recent survey conducted for the National AIDS Trust found that 21% thought that HIV could not be passed from one person to another during unprotected sexual intercourse.
Ignorance is not just the preserve of the British. Jacob Zuma, the former deputy president of South Africa and one-time head of that country’s National Aids Council, has said that he didn’t use a condom when having sex with a woman he knew to be HIV-positive because men were at little risk of becoming infected that way. In any case, he added, he took a shower immediately afterwards, which, he claimed, further reduced the risk.
Dear me.
Not only that, but one of Cardiff’s broadcast students had to do some voxpops about STIs. One interviewee, In response to being questioned on whether he would treat HIV-postive people any differently, came out with: “No, but I wouldn’t use the same cup as them and I’d bleach the toilet after they’d used it.”
Ignorance, it appears, is rife. Including, as I was so desperately mistaken, my own.
