Week 5

This week I have begun reading The Nakes Truth, undestandably this might be a little late to start reading a book but if there is a class to be honest in i think this is the one.I actually read one hundred pages of the book the first day I got it. I know to a lot of you out there that is nothing but I do not read that much into books I like much less a book whose biography it is may be the complete opposite of me. Marveyln is a black women from Nashville. I am a white, self proclaimed country boy, from way out yonder Florida. I know i should not enjoy the book, but I actually do. People have a hard time imagining one million people, or one million of anything for that fact. To put a face to AIDS like this book does, really changes the perspective that I had. I had the preconcieved notion that most people who are HIV postive become destitue and alone, not to mention dateless and sexless, but I was wrong. It definatlly changes the way I way I see people with the desease.

Another thing that has happened as I have went through this class is I am always scared I have HIV. I do not know whether this is a common occurance with people in the class or not. I guess that is why you want people to get tested during this class, to put people who are negative's mind at ease and let people who do not know there status know it.
Did You Know
The rate of transmission of HIV through a blood transfusion is between 80-90% whereas thransmission through sexual contact can be as low as .3%
http://uhavax.hartford.edu/bugl/hiv.htm#transmit

HIV in church

This week in church one of the pastors message was having an open heart and not to judge people. He was a New Yorker, which I being a good southerner had trouble getting over, and he did pastoral work in the city. He talked about a man who was for lack of a better term a man whore and how his baby momma wanted him to go to church one time. He did and changed his ways.
Then he talked about another man. A man who he said he saw come in church and sat off by himself and never really talked to anyone so my pastor decided he was going to be proactive. He sat down with the man and they talked. He was a homosexual man who had contracted HIV. He broke down to my pastor and told him everything and how he wanted to give his life to God. Instead of bible beating him with how homosexuals are bad and how HIV was God's wrath, blah blah blah, he didn't he just said okay and would help him where he can. Now my pastor knew nothing about HIV so he was scared he would catch it, but he still would do everything he could with this man. He spent the next few years meeting with this man once a week and in church on Sunday. My pastor never asked him about his sexual orientation after their initial meeting, even though the man said he remained celibate.
This made me think about people who are HIV positive. Maybe if churches looked at people who are HIV positive, despite how they contracted it, it would give those people another outlet for support instead of them feeling judged.

AIDS Foundation of South Africa

When I first read what I would have to be blogging about I had no idea on what country, not to mention what orginization I would write about. So I decided to pick a country first then an orginization. I picked South Africa, what seems to be the epecenter of the AIDS epidemic. What orginization would do more for people than a group of people who are inedated with it everyday. So I hit my best friend GOOGLE , which FYI is a number but it is spelled gogle, and found the AIDS Foundation of South Africa.
One program they are trying to implement is having the aditude towards masculenity align more with traditional western beliefs of masculenity. South Africa also has a high amount of domestic and sexual abuse. This domination of men over women, they believe, is a contributor to the wildfire like spread of HIV in there country.
This groups does everything from raise money and fund exactly what is needed at the time. They also have been persuing laws in South Africa against the descrimination of people with HIV/AIDS. It also has many women support groups all around South Africa.

DID YOU KNOW WHAT HIV LOOKS LIKE?

What makes the HIV virus so potent is because it is a retorvirus. It infiltrates a host cell and burst it keeping part of the cell to form an envelope to keep white blood calls from attacking it or recognizing it as an intruder. When an antibody or white blood cell come in contact with the virus the spikes "tell" the immune system it is from the host. It is because of the ability for the body to not easily detect the HIV virus it makes it hard to develop a vaccine.

This Week Post

As I was looking at the world wide number of AIDS patience I was unnerved by some numbers. Actually seeing how some countries' HIV/AIDS patience are scewed so much from sex to the other was just hard to comprehend. I was under the notion that HIV cases were roughly even distributed amongst the sexes. That could not have been farther from the truth. Some countries have 3 times the rate difference amongt the sexes. Even in the US there is a three-forths of new infections are males (Nobel, 2009)

The US, in comparison to the rest of the world, have fewer cases per capa. However it is still scary just knowing that there are a lot people who do have HIV/AIDS. The county I live in have 31 people in the county that are reported to have HIV (Florida Department of Health, 2009). It is wierd to say that. Thirty one people is a small class but that 31 can explode in no time. It is easy to hear a number of people in a place I will only see pictures of but to hear the number of people who live in my back door is a bigger pill to swollow, even though the number in my back yard is much smaller than that in the land I will never see.

Nobel, Ron. December 4, 2009. "HIV statistics." http://www.avert.org/usa-statisics.htm.

Florida Department of Health. November, 2009. "Florida Deparment of Desease Control Survalence Report."