Final Blog

Looking back on this term I feel like I learned a lot. I have taken human sexuality and a few other health classes here at OSU and health in high school as well. I feel like this class taught me a whole lot more than I learned in all of those other classes combined. I think that looking at a global aspect really helped. I think that as an American I am still pretty sheltered and don't really see what is going on outside of Oregon. I think that this class was a real eye-opener for problems in places like Africa where there is not nearly as much wealth. I don't think that I was really expecting much coming into this class and I feel like everything that was taught really opened me up to what is going on in the world. I think that the most useful thing was probably just the way that everything was taught. I know it was mostly just facts and statistics but the truth in this case is really scary. It makes me want to be much more aware of the risks that I might be getting involved in and definitely try to decrease the chances of ever getting an STD. I think the most useful thing that I learned was probably how HIV/AIDS works, like what it does in the body. I think that understanding what is going on is important and before this class I didn't really have an idea of what happened when a person got AIDS. I think that you have to understand what is going on to really think about the disease at all. The least useful thing, I have to say would probably be one of the guest speakers. I don't know I just didn't get that much out of it especially when we just watched a video. I think that for next time keep it pretty much the same. The energy was good in class, and the slowest parts were probably the videos but they were helpful for the most part. I think that this is an extremely important class to be taught in universities and would be very good as a required course. I think that people, especially students need to see this stuff and try to protect themselves and others from something that is possibly lifelong.

Bob Skinner's AIDs presentation

I feel like Bob Skinner was very educated on living with AIDS. He has lived with it for quite a while now so he knows pretty much all that he can about it. I think he was a very helpful resource for information about the disease. As a class we should have asked more questions to get him to talk more about his personal experiences and maybe some of the things that he has gone through. Instead he talked a lot about who should take the blame for the start of the disease and a lot about the medical expenses and how many pills someone needs to take. I understand that this is some information about his day to day life with the disease but it got away from him and more just into general AIDs information, at least that is how I felt.

Obviously the disease is very different as we look at various areas of the globe. We look at Bob and he seems like a pretty well off (money wise) white gay male. He fits the stereotypical person with AIDs in the U.S. but is very different when looking at a global sense. If we look at Africa alone, the majority of the cases are women and there are way more cases in many countries. These people also tend to be poor and can't always afford medication. He showed us those pills and what the daily regimen of medication is like for someone with AIDS. Most people in countries with a lot of poverty can't afford this kind of treatment.

Condom use was the reason for so much heterosexual transmission of AIDS. The reason we see this comes from lack of education more than anything else. We in the U.S., know how to get condoms and usually get them for free. In many rural parts of the world they don't know anything about condoms and really don't know that this protects against the spread of AIDS. Also it is most common in heterosexual people which comes a lot from male dominance as well. Women in these areas have a real hard/ impossible time getting a man to wear a condom. These areas are also really hard to get treatment of HIV. There may not be proper healthcare in a lot of these areas. There is also very little money to pay for treatment. There also exists different types of medical treatment than many areas of the world like some still believe in medicine men that will heal them through old school techniques of treatment.