Over at Nursing Voices the competition to win an iphone is in full swing. I am pleased to report that debate and discussion has been going pretty strong, but we still need more people over there to join in and guess what? It really isn’t too late, the competition still has a couple of weeks to run and the winner could be you! Now for those of us in the UK to win an iphone would be pretty special, seeing as I don’t think they have quite arrived here yet. If there is one thing, in my humble opinion that is still missing from the debate over at Nursing Voices, that is the voice of the Brit and that means those of you who are nurses and are British and sometimes read the drivel that I write. So, instead of reading on, why don’t you pop over there, register and start posting now what can be easier and what can be better?
Of course you might not be a nurse, and you might have been to nursing voices, posted and returned. Which is a pretty good thing because I have more to say!
What do you know about AIDS? A disease of the present? Something that happened to gay people in the past? Well, from the programme I watched on TV the other night it seems that for many people AIDS is truly rooted in the past. I was a student nurse in the early 1980s at a time when we were first finding out about the awful disease that was killing young men at a rate of knots. The first few patients I cared for died of illnesses for which there seemed to be no name, but there was panic amongst many of their friends who were quite rightly scared, but not for the reasons they thought. They couldn’t catch this illness by visiting and sitting close to the beds of their friends by holding their hands. Many of those people were already infected and didn’t know it. 25 years on though, there are apparently gay men out there who thing they are in no danger, there are still more who have sex with men because they have HIV and want to try to catch it. There are heterosexual couples who think they are immune, there are people sleeping with Africans who have no idea of the risks. Then there is the stigma. There are people out there treating people like lepers because they have HIV, they are daubing paint of peoples houses and shouting names at them in the street.
We have had 25 years or more to get used to this. People, thousands of people have died and some of those have been famous enough to make people sit up and notice. But still the young people (and those who are older and should know) appear to be completely in the dark about how to avoid HIV and AIDS, that they should practice safe sex and that you cannot catch AIDS from a cup of coffee, or holding hands. We have email, we have little pieces of plastic to communicate with each other in the street, we have music blasting in our ears from another little plastic box and yet we cannot seem to get the message. Something is very wrong there!
