Ana Haase-Reed doesn’t think she’s any more at risk for HIV or AIDS than anyone else, but that didn’t stop her from getting tested. The 19-year-old University sophomore said she was tested a couple of years ago just for “basic safety.”
World AIDS Day is Saturday, and as the event reaches its 14th year, health care professionals in the United States are concerned that HIV/AIDS awareness among the college-age population isn’t what it should be.
“I’d say I’m about average; I did pay attention in school,” said Haase-Reed, a public relations major who said she was only vaguely aware that there was such a thing as World AIDS Day. “I don’t think about it a lot, not having ever known anybody (with HIV or AIDS), but I do keep it in mind — it’s always in the back of my head.”
Twenty-one-year-old junior Brian Stutzman expressed similar feelings.
“I would say most people have it in the back of their minds, but don’t think about it very much,” Stutzman said. “It’s probably not as pressing as it should be.”
Stutzman, a general science major, said he doesn’t know anyone with HIV or AIDS personally and isn’t sure if anyone he knows has ever been tested. He said that he hasn’t and isn’t worried about it because he’s always been careful. Stutzman said while he feels there are risks, he never really thought about HIV or AIDS at the University.
“I assume with all the partying, there’s a lot of unsafe sex,” Stutzman said. “But I don’t think AIDS in particular (is a problem).”
According to Dr. Gerald Fleischli, director of the University Health Center, students like Haase-Reed and Stutzman seem to typify HIV/AIDS attitudes among college students.
“One of the very sad things in past studies,” Fleischli said, “is that it usually wouldn’t be until people knew someone personally that they would be concerned.”
Fleischli said that recent studies indicate about 3 in every 1,000 people are infected with HIV — but less than half of them are aware of it. He added that the Health Center usually conducts 600-700 HIV tests per year, but it has been several years since there was a positive test.
Fleischli said he believes that’s because people who are at high risk for contracting the disease aren’t being tested, at least not at the Health Center.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that between 650,000 and 900,000 people are currently infected with HIV in the United States. Since 1994, AIDS has been one of the leading causes of death for Americans 25-44 years old, and the incidence of AIDS among 13- to 25-year-olds rose 20 percent between 1990 and 1995.
But Fleischli said the increased availability of viable treatment options for people with HIV, such as the so-called “triple-cocktail” prescription drug treatment, along with more effective treatments for AIDS, may have led people to believe that HIV and AIDS are chronic diseases rather than lethal ones.
In order to combat that perception on campus, the University Peer Health Educators, an outreach group associated with the Health Center’s Health Education division, has posted signs with HIV and AIDS statistics on East 13th Avenue in honor of World AIDS day. The group is also holding a ceremony to rededicate the World AIDS Day Tree in front of the Health Center today at noon.
According to Health Educator Ani Dochnahl, the tree was planted in honor of World AIDS Day in 1998. Dochnahl said she hopes the event, which will feature a performance by the University music school’s Saxophone Quartet and a poetry reading, will help to remind students — many of whom didn’t witness the diseases’ first lethal outbreaks in the late 1970s and early 1980s — that HIV and AIDS are still a problem.
“The goal,” she said, “is to not let safer-sex fatigue set into our younger generation.”
Emerald higher education reporter Leon Tovey can be reached at [email protected].