The AIDS and HIV Threat in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania

I. Background

When I began this project to research the threat that AIDS and HIV posed to my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the surrounding Allegheny County, I thought I was relatively knowledgeable on the subject.  Little did I know, even with learning about the disease in high school and doing a research project for Biology, I was still quite ignorant to how AIDS impacts my home city.  When I was asked on the first day of class to guess how many cumulative AIDS cases there have been in Allegheny County, my guess was less than 100.  In fact there have been 2,351 cumulative AIDS cases, almost twenty four times that of my guess (see table 1.1)!  The goal of this investigation is to determine why my estimate was so low, and also what degree AIDS and HIV are prevalent in my hometown.

The first time I remember hearing about AIDS I was in junior high and had just begun to take an interest in current events and started listening to the news.  Not surprisingly, while listening to National Public Radio I did not hear news about AIDS in Pittsburgh or the suburb where I lived, Upper Saint Clair.  Instead, I heard how the illness was ravaging Africa or the slums of New York City.  During High School, I was required by the Pennsylvania Department of Education to learn about “health problems that can occur throughout life and describe ways to prevent them, [including] cancer, diabetes, STD/HIV/AIDS, cardiovascular disease [etc]” (1).  Our class also went over the details of the disease and how it is spread.  Although the subject was taught as if AIDS were only an ordinary STI, we did learn modes of transmission and were open in our discussion of the illness.  Most of my current knowledge of AIDS came from a project I did during my senior year analyzing the details of AIDS and the HIV virus.  While researching this assignment I learned a lot about the science of AIDS and HIV, but remained oblivious to its presence in Allegheny County.

Proceed to II. The Media