Pooja Bhatia, a twenty-four-year-old strategic planner, explained, “I think people our age talk about HIV/AIDS in the context of developing nations. I rarely hear someone talk about how HIV/AIDS affects them personally.”
Social justice documentary filmmaker Alley Pezanoski-Browne, twenty-four, added: “I don’t think there is a ton of dialogue about HIV and AIDS among people our age. We know it exists and we need to take precautions, and then we don’t worry about it because I think very few of us actually know anyone our age who has HIV or AIDS.”
But we do know people who we may not realize have HIV/AIDS, and certainly not everyone who’s infected knows their status. While life-saving anti-retroviral drugs mean that HIV-positive people are living longer, more than 126,000 American women are currently infected.
I’m not suggesting women scare their friends into thinking their chances of infection are much higher than they actually are, or that they spend their next paycheck on (Product) RED wares sold by Apple, Gap, or other retailers. But we owe it to ourselves to pay more attention to the havoc the disease is wreaking on women worldwide and practice methods that will decrease our own risks. When we so carefully select our sunscreen and birth control medications to protect our bodies, why are we being so passive in finding out how we can keep from becoming infected?
While 12,000 new infections annually among American women doesn’t sound very high, Iskandar left me with an unnerving consideration. “We don’t have to wait until other regions more similarly resemble those that are most devastated. Even though prevalence rates are still low here, they are still numbers. They’re still lives.”
Hearing about AIDS in America as major milestones are reached, such as the twenty-fifth anniversary of the epidemic, but not frequently in day-to-day news coverage, tricks us into thinking that the disease isn’t very worrisome. I thought Hung Nguyen, a twenty-six-year-old MBA student, did a good job identifying the reasons why our peers are more likely to talk about STDs (and many times more likely to find themselves discussing Oscar fashions) than about HIV/AIDS. “There’s not a lot of perceived relevance for us,” said Nguyen, who came to the Stanford conference in preparation for a consulting trip on human trafficking in Cambodia and Thailand. She said that while she’s always been interested in women’s issues, her knowledge about HIV/AIDS has primarily been academic. “My friends and I read about the disease when there’s a major piece in the New York Times or when events related to it come up, but we don’t talk about it very often.”
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