Feature

It’s not who you are but what you do

The Health Education Authority’s approach to HIV and AIDS may undo years of positive work, says Frankie Lynch

Late last year the Health Education Authority (HEA) launched a £3.5m advertising campaign to explain the difference between HIV and AIDS, and to encourage safer sex. It suggested that the only difference is ‘time’, and safer sex required you to ’use a condom’ (with fewer partners of course).

The HEA is a health education organisation whose overall aim is to disseminate accurate and helpful information to the general public on health matters.

Yet its AIDS campaign appears to do precisely the opposite, and serves little educational purpose.

How can a message that is loaded with pessimism and inaccuracy assist people to make informed decisions about their health?

There is to much uncertainty around AIDS, and the progression of the virus, to make such categorical epidemiological statements.

The outcome of this insensitive campaign can only induce greater stress and worry for people with AIDS, people who are HIV positive and the worried well, and in effect, inevitably lead to a deterioration of health rather than reassuring those who badly need it.

For the HEA to adopt such a fatalistic approach contradicts all the rules for any health educational programme, which should be promoting positive action on health, individually and collectively.

These adverts not only undo the years of valuable work done by the voluntary sector, like the Terrance Higgins Trust, Frontliners and Body Positive, but actively seek to deny people living with AIDS and HIV and their partners, lovers, family and friends, any sense of power over themselves and their immune systems, thus taking away hope, determination and will to carry on.

The most recent selection of adverts showing ‘healthy’ young people attempts to explore the invisibility of HIV infection in a novel way, but the text fails yet again to explain that it isn’t who you are, but what you do, that matters in the prevention of HIV.

Sadly, it seems that it is the HEA which still doesn’t know the difference.