My High School and Middle School
The Media
With an average rate almost 100 points below the national average, Santa Clara County must be doing something right in AIDS prevention. And they are. Every year, Silicon Valley has a 10k walk to benefit AIDS programs and research studies, organized by AIDS Coalition Silicon Valley (Here). The mission of ACSV is “to mobilize support, particularly financial support, for local AIDS service organizations and to increase awareness of HIV/AIDS issues” and to “ensure that local HIV/AIDS service and prevention programs have the resources to they need to effectively undertake their work.”[1] ACSV is an umbrella group that takes in funds and distributes them to various area AIDS groups, including the “AIDS Emergency Fund, AIDS Legal Services, Bill Wilson Center, Health Connections, Asian Americans for Community Involvement, Health Education & Training Center, ProLatino, Billy DeFrank LGBT Community Center and the ACSV Education and Advocacy Project.”[2] ACSV has raised $2.3 million since 1990 for various Bay Area AIDS services and groups. However, I had never heard of the Silicon Valley AIDS walk before I did research for this class, so although advertising may be effective in target groups, people outside those groups are less likely to have heard about them.
In addition, there are far greater numbers of articles in the San Jose Mercury News archives (articles since 1985), which means people are talking about the issue. For searches on the keyword HIV/AIDS, there were 325 results, for searches on HIV there were 3092 articles. The New York times, another paper I read, whose archives date from 1981, had much poorer search results. For HIV/AIDS, there were 101 search results, for HIV, 3092 results.[3] I did not conduct a search on “AIDS,” because of the possibility of search results coming back such as “US aids France in searching for…blah blah.” Even with the plethora of articles on the issue, both newspapers tend to emphasize the problems with AIDS outside the United States, especially in Africa. Out of 66 articles published in the last year in the Mercury News on HIV/AIDS, only five were about HIV/AIDS in either Santa Clara County or neighboring communities. Twenty-three articles dealt with AIDS nationally, and the remaining twenty-eight were about HIV/AIDS in the world.
On July 7th, the San Jose Mercury News ran an opinion letter (located on the back page of the A section) that addressed a recent speech by Hillary Clinton by applauding one of her talking points, “If HIV/AIDS were the leading cause of death among white women between the ages of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country.” So it is clear that still, AIDS is a problem that people are not addressing to the extent it is affecting the country.
One of the few articles in the Mercury News database that addressed AIDS in the bay area was entitled, “Uproar over ban on gays' blood” from January 22nd 2007 by a staff writer for the Mercury News. A senior at Harbor High school in Santa Cruz was banned from donating blood because he admitted to sexual relations with other men. It is an FDA policy to do so because of the higher rate of STDs and HIV in gay men than the general population. This incident reignited a mostly stagnant debate over the fairness of restricting certain groups from donating blood, especially since blood bank levels in the Bay Area are at a record low, and any new blood is needed. The changing climate of AIDS and how it is most commonly transmitted led many in the school community to demand a re-visitation of FDA policy.[4]
Two of the six articles - "Santa Clara County snafu means no rapid HIV tests -- for now," and "Paperwork glitch stalls program of rapid HIV tests" about HIV/AIDS in California were about a mistake by a testing worker that led to the government temporarily halting rapid HIV tests in Santa Clara County.
The remaining article, "Judge OKs sale of Your Black Muslim Bakery for use as AIDS treatment center," was about the opening of a new AIDS treatment center in Oakland, a city in Alameda County with a large HIV/AIDS problem.