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.