Discovering a Problem: Initial Guesswork

On the second day of class, Professor Yoshino asked us to consider the research that we had already done for the course and make educated guesses in response to a few questions that he had written for each of us.  After we had written our guesses, we were then allowed to look at the actual answers.

1. How many cumulative AIDS cases have been reported for Montclair?

          1,000     real answer = 327

2. How many cumulative AIDS cases have been reported for West Orange?

           500        real answer = 145

3. What percent of the cases are female in Essex County?

           60%      real answer = 37%

Why did I guess what I did?

When asked questions regarding AIDS in Essex County on the second day of class, my guesses were very high. I guessed that Montclair’s cumulative HIV/AIDS cases numbered 1,000, when in reality the count stands at 327. Similarly, I overshot West Orange’s total (145) by guessing 500, and predicted the percentage of total cases that were females to be 60% when in reality it is 37%.  A just assumption would be that the school district and the media had done a thorough enough job to "scare" me into thinking that a much larger problem exists. However, my guesses were high because the research that I did in the weeks leading up to this course caught me off guard.  The reports that I read from the state and national governments were far more information than I had ever been exposed to on HIV/AIDS. I guessed high because I never received a thorough education on AIDS as a disease or as a serious health problem in Essex County.

With just the research that I did in the weeks prior to the start of this course, I've discovered that AIDS is a huge problem that is being hidden by the media in Essex County.  The archives of local newspapers hold articles that address AIDS as a primarily African problem with little or no coverage of the AIDS epidemic on this continent, let alone in our own backyards. Shockingly to me, some of the cumulative HIV/AIDS rates in Essex are many times the cumulative national rate, 339 per 100,000. Most notably, Newark’s cumulative HIV/AIDS rate is 3394 per 100,000, or 10 times the national rate.