Enough with the facial Prophylactics: Aids and H1N1

Tonite I saw on Twitter that @jordanmitcheld tweeted:

@mrskutcher 90 people get swine flu & everybody wants 2wear surgical masks. 1 mill people have AIDS & nobody wants 2wear a condom

It’s perhaps the most honest appraisal of the Swine Flu situation in the U.S. and across the world which is why it made me take pause.

Why is this flu so bad that it’s suddenly the number one killer on the public’s mind? It’s certainly not the Flu’s mortality rate. The symptoms suck but it’s not as if you bleed out of every orifice! So why is the Swine Flu capturing our attention in such a way that smart citizens are rushing out and buying masks that in many cases only block 68% of the particles and work best when worn by the infected person?

AIDS kills a lot of people; that’s an understatement, car accidents kill a lot of people, AIDS is a mass murder of a disease, yet it can be stopped or at the least inhibited through proper education and wearing a thin piece of rubber.

So why isn’t there a constant run on condoms? It’s because AIDS is still the disease that affects gays, drug users, hookers and other “unmentionable” members of society. Upstanding citizens don’t get AIDS! Especially ones who aren’t lying in bed with strangers. But the Swine Flu. It’s named after a dirty animal! I could get it from touching a door knob; standing next to someone at a soccer game, shaking the hand of the president at a respected university.

Swine Flu could come from…gasp…anyone…anywhere!

That’s the problem. Right now, the majority of the public feels safe from AIDS; so long as they obey the rules they won’t catch AIDS. Play it safe and nothing bad will happen to you. For many people, H1N1 or the Swine Flu is exactly the opposite; it’s out there, waiting, to pounce from anywhere.

It’s sad disheartening that people still think this way about AIDS. I don’t care how much you claim to worry about it for the majority of our population AIDS is somebody else’s problem, just like Swine Flu would have been had it stayed in Mexico. This perception will be a hard one to change, and I don’t have the answers but until people start looking at AIDS as a problem for all of humanity, it will remain a problem that no one cares about until it hits close to home. And that’s what’s sad.