Health promotion strategies and implementation

Health Promotion:

American HIV Prevention in an Era of False Security - an Investigative Study

AIDS is one of the most dangerous diseases to affect humankind. AIDS awareness is best-funded and best-taught in the United States of America. This realization is especially apparent when HIV rates are examined in African countries and some Asian countries such as India. Education levels about sexually transmitted diseases in general - and funding for prevention and treatment programs - are very low in many foreign countries.

Americans, on the other hand, have been very fortunate to enjoy a high level of free and public education and impressive levels of funding for prevention and treatment programs. Almost every urban center in America has clinics that offer free HIV testing and counseling. This awareness and general academic and emotional acceptance of AIDS has, during the last two decades, fought hard against the spreading of the disease. The entire gamut of health promotion workers in America is to thank for this improvement.

However, this year, for the first time in several years, the incidence of HIV infections has grown in America. Many doctors and health promotion professionals attribute this recent growth to a lifestyle shift in which Americans have grown lax in their concern about AIDS. More and more Americans are living productive lives even though they are HIV positive because of very expensive drugs that are quite toxic as well. Erwin Magic Johnson, the legendary basketball player, is a perfect example. Johnson is at the center of an advertising campaign that seeks to encourage HIV positive patients that all is not lost, that life is still livable with the disease.

Though this is a positive message, the backlash, as health promotion experts note, is that Americans have stopped worrying as much about the disease and are again regressing to lifestyle patterns that increase the spread of the disease. Although many people still continue to live with HIV, many others die from AIDS, and that is what Americans have, to a certain degree, forgotten.

This paper will examine the changes that need to be made, and their relative effects and unintended side effects, from a health promotion perspective to increase awareness of AIDS and HIV in an era when people are once again lowering their guard against the disease.

Also this paper will make recommendations that will contribute to fundamental health promotion ideals in reducing the incidents of the AIDS virus in America. The recommendations will be made in the Data Analysis Chapter, and then summarized and listed in the Summary Chapter as well.