MY STORY
The sex and HIV/AIDS education in Utah is limited but there. Luckily sex and STD/HIV Education is required by the Board of Education for the State of Utah and notes on the what the education should mandate simply say must stress abstinence. Since I went through the system my perspective is that I personally don’t remember much about AIDS, all I remember hearing about was don’t have sex until you’re married because it is against “The Church”, Jesus Christ of Ladder-day Saints, more commonly know as Mormons. Now looking back I realize that just because STD/HIV education was required by the state of Utah doesn’t mean it was actually taught. The State of Utah needs to take action in the fight to stop AIDS and it starts, as most things do, with the school system and the people that come out of it. There was emphasis on sex education but only because it was required. It was assumed by most everyone that sex didn’t happen until marriage so how would anyone contract the disease in the first place. Promiscuity was unheard of and if some dirty story slipped out it was immediately under wraps and forgotten because of the way Utah is. It’s a shady place but they have to keep up the appearance that it is the perfect place to live, raise a family, be apart of the Mormon culture, and not have any perception of the problems facing human kind today; most urgent being HIV/AIDS.
I had a difficult time figuring out where I might have absorbed information that caused me to guess as high as I did; local newspapers showed next to nothing and news stories were about the same, but I knew it had to be mostly from the media. I finally thought it out and realized that the only afternoon television I watch is baseball and Oprah. I immediately searched the Oprah website and magazines for anything HIV/AIDS related and came up with 550 story results. I skimmed through a couple of the stories and instantly recognized at least twenty stories that had been on past episodes. That’s when it hit me. This is where my information came from. This is why I guessed high; my source was Oprah. With stories labeled “The New Faces of HIV/AIDS: Lessons Learned”, and “Shocking HIV/AIDS Statistics”, I saw the effect television has on the general public first hand. Maybe I could have had a better perspective of my State’s HIV/AIDS situation, but when Oprah, one of the most powerful women in the world, is my informational source how could I not guess high? The main reason my guess was so astronomical was because I took what Oprah presented about the HIV/AIDS situation in a world wide and national sense and applied it directly to the state of Utah. I should have realized that every HIV/AIDS case is unique, and that different places have different approaches (or lack thereof) to solving their individual HIV/AIDS problem. Also I needed to recognize that Oprah’s views, although well intentioned, isn’t necessarily correct.
I know I’m not stupid and I heard more than one opinion because I read the papers and watched the news. The local newspapers in Salt Lake County didn’t hide the HIV/AIDS epidemic but they weren’t uncovering it either. I searched the Lexis Nexus archives of the two major papers in Salt Lake County, The Salt Lake Tribune and The Deseret News. When I searched the Salt Lake Tribune I found a total of 226 stories, most of which had to do with financial aid, just a matching keyword. But the few stories I found relevant to HIV/AIDS had information about the disease and it’s effect on the local community located in articles such as “U. of U. researchers get NIH funding to study HIV/AIDS” and “For Patients, AIDS Spells Many Fights”. Although the articles didn’t really talk about HIV/AIDS as a problem in Utah they did talk about HIV/AIDS prevention, some background info on the disease, and what research is being done and where. I think those types of articles and news stories make the general public aware to the disease but not enough. If I were a typical Utahn, born and raised conservative, the only understanding I would have about this disease would be from the news. Also, I found in my searches that most HIV/AIDS related stories were under the “WORLD” section (most were from the associated press) signifying it as a problem in the World and not a problem in Utah. An example is the article from the Salt Lake Tribune titled “DC: HIV Tests Should be given to all”, it obviously talks about HIV/AIDS testing but is in the “WORLD” section of the newspaper even though its subject was pertinent to the united States. If I were reading the paper and skipped to the “WORLD” section, I would automatically associate every story in that section with international issues, although America’s problem was discussed. The media coverage seemed to imply that the problem of HIV/AIDS was somewhere else, never to touch the dry mountainous soil of Utah.
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