What can we do to prevent the transmission of HIV in the US?
We should be doing a lot more to prevent the transmission of HIV in the United States. But what can we do? We can have more media campaigns for the need for safe sex. If you look at what happened to smoking cessation, we have achieved great things in the United States but we had tremendous media advertising to do that. We had sick people smoking through tracheostomies on television and many, many advertisements. We do not see that for HIV and yet many young people are getting infected because of the lack of awareness. We should be pushing condoms. We should be advertising condoms and we should also be promoting HIV testing. The CDC is trying to do this but who distributes HIV infections? infected people. So a good way to prevent it is to find all the HIV positive people and educate them about being at risk and concentrate prevention efforts on these infected people. If we don't test routinely we don't find out who's HIV positive so we can't work with them to prevent them spreading it. There is much more that can and should be done in this country to prevent spread of HIV, many young people are contracting it because they are not taking precautions.
