China launched its first major television campaign this week to promote condom use to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, according to Reuters.

The article says China will have an estimated 50,000 new HIV infections in 2007, compared with 70,000 in 2005, according to a report by the State Council (Cabinet) and the United Nations last week. That means the country will have about 700,000 people living with HIV/AIDS this year, up from an earlier estimate of 650,000.

While the ad may appear timid compared to ones used elsewhere in the world, Chinese actor Pu Cunxin said it marked a breakthrough that sex was now able to be discussed publicly.

“That this appears on television is a very big advance,” he said. “But the question of sex and condoms is still taboo. Sex is not bad. It’s something that should be talked about.”

According to the article, condom use in China among vulnerable groups such as prostitutes and men who have sex with men remains low.

Watch one of the commercials, featuring Jackie Chan:

A forum about sex education in Florida’s St. Lucie County schools managed to garner several hundred attendees.

The local school superintendent recommended Get Real about AIDS, which includes discussion of sexually transmitted diseases, as well as both abstinence and contraception, to the school board in August.

School officials released a modified version of Get Real About AIDS last week in which they removed descriptions of sexual activities, hands-on demonstrations of condoms and an exercise where students would have been asked to purchase condoms. Despite those modifications, controversy over the curriculum has not diminished.

According to the Palm Beach Post article, the program was recommended in light of concerns that the health curriculum wasn’t doing enough to combat sexually transmitted diseases. St. Lucie County has Florida’s highest rate of HIV and AIDS cases among black residents, according to statistics the health department released last year.

To see how your state compares to others in AIDS/HIV rates, as well as other health care issues, you might want to check out the Kaiser Foundation’s state health facts Web site.

Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton vowed Thursday to boost U.S. spending on HIV/AIDS prevention and encourage abstinence and the use of condoms to eradicate it, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Part of the solution, she said, is to teach “abstinence, be faithful and use condoms if necessary.”

At the Global Summit on AIDS event, reiterated a $50-billion plan announced days ago to fight AIDS and malaria.

The plan would increase U.S. spending to fight AIDS by about 20%, according to David Bryden, a spokesman for the Global Aids Alliance. All of the Democratic presidential candidates have committed to the same funding proposal, he said.

Other presidential candidates weighed via a video about their stances on AIDS prevention and sex education.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Romney and Arizona Sen. McCain praised AIDS-fighting efforts initiated by President Bush, with McCain saying he would favor continuing an “abstinence-only approach” to education about sex and sexually transmitted diseases in U.S. humanitarian efforts abroad.

For more detail about the various presidential candidates’ stances on sex education, please see this related post. The Kaiser Network’s presidential news and analysis Web site gives a good overview of Clinton’s speech and other news outlets’ coverage.

Health advocates and students were arrested outside the White House today during a protest right before World Aids Day, according to The Washington Post.

 Demonstrators said the Bush administration’s response to the spread of AIDS has been ineffective. They called for increased funding and an end to abstinence-only sex education requirements for U.S.-funded HIV and AIDS programs internationally. They said the disease also has been largely ignored at home in the nation’s capital, which has the country’s worst rate of infection.

AVERT, an international AIDS charity, has a Web page devoted to the relationship between HIV infection rates and sex education.

According to a Los Angeles Times article, there is an increasing national push among public health officials and educators for more HIV prevention efforts aimed at aging baby boomers and seniors.

In Arizona, volunteers regularly have passed out free condoms at community centers, and state health workers in Florida host safe-sex programs in retirement communities. In Broward County, Fla., the Senior HIV Intervention Project recruits retired boomers and older residents throughout the region to become “safe-sexperts” who can convince their neighbors to get tested for STDs.

The article suggests seniors are overlooked in HIV prevention and safe sex education initiatives because the over-50 population is a relatively small segment of the population at-risk for sexually transmitted diseases.

Approximately four times as many HIV diagnoses occurred in people ages 25 to 44 as in those 50 and older, according to a 2005 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But this makes seniors more vulnerable because they are overlooked and may have a false sense of security, or a sense of immunity to STDs as they grow older.

Older patients may feel uncomfortable discussing STD risks. But in addition, doctors are also potentially uncomfortable talking about these issues with patients old enough to be their parents or grandparents, according to a recent study backed by the National Institutes of Health.
Another factor to consider is that people now are living longer than previous generations have, and enjoying extended sex lives because of hormone therapy and erectile dysfunction drugs, according to the article.

What do you think? Do you think more funding should be allocated for HIV education and prevention efforts aimed at seniors? According to the article, the majority of funding for preventive education over the last two decades has been aimed at traditional high-risk populations, including teens, gays and urban residents.

An article in The Evening Observer discusses the evolution in Jamestown’s sex education programs after the national spotlight on Nushawn Williams, who infected more than a dozen girls with HIV in the area in 1997, knowing he was HIV positive. The youngest girl was 13, the oldest in her mid-20s.

When DiMaio [a former health educator] first started teaching in the early 1970s, he said sex was something which couldn’t be discussed in health class. But then Nushawn appeared, and things changed pretty quickly.

‘‘Jamestown went from being very, very, very conservative on sexual education,’’ he said, ‘‘and then we went to being very progressive about it. I think what happens is some of these (organizations) had to rush into it real quick because they didn’t have anything.’’

After news of the HIV outbreak, there was a study in six county schools at the request of the Chautauqua County Health Department to provide insight into adolescents’ thinking, and their behaviors and attitudes.

The study found almost all high school students answered questions about HIV correctly, while two-thirds of younger students did as well. Ninety-five percent of the respondents indicated they learned about AIDS in school, with more than half indicating they had received flyers and pamphlets on the subject.

The researchers also found almost a third of the students had kissed by seventh grade, more than one-third of the eighth-graders had been touched on the breast or genitals. And of the 2,503 who answered the question, ‘‘Have you ever had intercourse,’’ 704 indicated ‘‘yes.’’ Many reported being sexually active between the ages of 13 and 16, with 47 percent of respondents indicating they did not or had never used a condom.

After the results of the report were published, Ms. Metzger said there was an increase in sexual education programming in area districts and communities. However, she and other county officials have noticed a drop in the number of programs offered as the years went by after the incident.

This article is an interesting look at one town’s increased scrutiny of its sex ed programs following a major event. It also raises the issue of how administrators and communities can continue to promote sex education over time, rather than having the programs languish as they did in Jamestown’s case.

An article in Southern Voice discusses the decline of condom use among young gay men, which it attributes to a change in the view of AIDS from an automatic death sentence to a more manageable illness, thanks to the introduction of highly effective anti-AIDS drugs in the mid-’90s. The article also suggests that less visibility and promotion of condoms has not helped matters.

The condom-friendly sex education of the ’90s has been replaced wholesale by the Bush administration’s devotion to abstinence-until-marriage, while, simultaneously, marriage has become a legal impossibility for most gay and lesbian Americans.

This decline in condom use among young gay men, which has not been seen in the general population, is also leading to higher rates of HIV among young gay men.

The HIV rate for gay and bisexual men 13-24 years old declined by 30 percent from 1994 to 1998, but skyrocketed 41 percent from 1999 to 2003, according to a 10-year analysis of HIV diagnosis among youth ages 13-24 conducted by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.

The CDC notes that although HIV diagnoses are on the rise among gay youth, studies “indicate that teens are making more responsible decisions about sex,” with more teens delaying sex, or using a condom more often.

I thought the article’s argument that sex education messages haven’t been updated or pushed the way that commercial products have been was interesting.

Latex condoms have been around since 1912, and have been the primary weapon to in the fight against HIV/AIDS for more than 25 years. Companies like Coca-Cola launch new advertising campaigns every few years to capture new generations of youth, while the wear-a-condom-to-avoid-AIDS message hasn’t been modified in decades, Children’s Hospital’s Futterman said.

The article also raised an interesting issue about the heteronormative content of sex education programs. Programs operate under the assumption that students are heterosexual and, according to an HIV-positive gay man quoted in the article, “During our sex education, they, No. 1, never talked about gay sex, and No. 2, they never talked about having sex and using condoms.”

With abstinence-until-marriage messages contradicted by constitutional same-sex marriage bans, gay youth “are basically told their very existence is not accepted,” said Futterman. Even sex education programs that talk explicitly about sex may not resonate with gay students, Lescano said. “Kids who self-identify as gay, and who are out and know that, do need interventions that are specific to them,” Lescano said.

Sex education programs are already a touchy subject. But as gay rights becomes a more prominent issue in our culture, it raises the issue of when sex education programs will also try to be inclusive of gays’ lifestyles. Will it be when/if same-sex marriage is mandated across the country?