Saturday, September 17, 2011

I am confused about signage

Often when looking at random signs and advertisements the first thing we see is a IMPORTANT STATISTIC.  It is designed to be disturbing and to show us that a problem is much bigger than we thought it was, thus creating a need for change.  This sign didn't quite accomplish that:


The thing I cannot fathom is what exactly is weird about this statistic.  People under 30 tend to have a lot of sex, with varied partners.  They also comprise a pretty large chunk of the 'old enough to have sex' age bracket.  Why would anybody be shocked that 1/3 of HIV diagnoses are in this age group?  Clearly finding ways to combat HIV is good, but how can this be considered a shocking sort of statistic?  Were there really a lot of people out there who figured that everyone getting HIV was over age 30?

4 comments:

  1. I'm actually surprised the number is that low.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, it would seem like "2/3 new HIV infections are people over 30" would be a more important public health message. People around our age grew up with the idea that you use a condom, but people not much older than us didn't. They apparently need to have it driven home that they need to start using them.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I neither think the number is high nor low; it seems likely that people under 30 make up about a third of the sexual encounters outside of monogamous relationships. If that were not more or less true, I'd be rather surprised.

    What I think would be a *far* more effective advertisement, which I haven't yet seen, is something along the lines of:

    Even with the best of modern medicine, the average lifespan of someone diagnosed with HIV is X years.

    Too many young gay men now consider HIV to be not a big deal, and infection to be something which is "bound to happen eventually". Yes, that sounds insane; but HIV exists in the unholy nexus of faux teenage invulnerability, drug use and the male sex drive.

    If I hadn't heard it said in earnest, with my own ears, from multiple sources I wouldn't believe it either.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yeah, there are lots of different statistics that this sign could have used - maybe something as simple as "Every year there are X new HIV infections diagnosed in Canada in people under 30." The chosen statistic is pretty mindboggling though.

    ReplyDelete